The Gendered Slow Violence of Global Environmental Governance in Suau, Papua New Guinea

Gender equality has become a required element of development and environmental governance regimes globally. However, local gender relations and understandings of equality are often marginalised within internationally driven interventions. In this article, we examine the interconnected and attritional ways that global environmental governance programs, specifically climate change mitigation and conservation projects, foreground categories of gender and erode relational sociality. Through reciprocal collaboration and ethnography in the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea, we engage with the Suau notion of wawahin edi pilipili (women’s problems). By tracing ‘women’s problems’ through the Central Suau Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) Pilot Project and a Save the Forest conservation project, we examine global environmental governance as a form of ‘slow violence’—following Nixon (2011), an incremental, almost invisible process where attention is forcibly shifted from the negotiation of relationships to categorical imperatives.