Gendering traditional knowledge in Pacific climate adaptation and disaster management: a critical narrative review

Climate change is posing severe challenges for Pacific Island societies, whose resilience is underpinned by rich traditional knowledge (TK) developed over generations. Yet, much of this knowledge is held, transmitted and practised along gendered lines that remain poorly documented and frequently marginalised within formal adaptation governance. Drawing on an integrative critical narrative review of interdisciplinary literature identified through a structured search and a read-through of feminist political ecology and decolonial scholarship, this paper examines how gendered TK in Pacific Island communities contributes to climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction. We organise the evidence across four interconnected domains: gendered agricultural and food security knowledge; women’s knowledge of water and marine resource management; gendered risk awareness in disaster risk reduction; and women’s knowledge of caregiving and community recovery. Our primary evidence comes from the high islands of Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. At the same time, we read the low-lying atolls of Kiribati as a comparative counterpoint rather than treating the Pacific as an ecological monolith. We show that women’s ecological expertise, leadership, and caregiving roles bolster adaptive capacity at the community level while remaining systematically undervalued in formal decision-making. We argue that colonial legacies and development paradigms have marginalised women’s knowledge; that climate initiatives that ignore gender risks reinforce these inequities and produce maladaptation; and that the recognition of TK is insufficient unless the gendered politics of authority, labour, and recognition are also addressed. Centring gender in Pacific climate adaptation is, we contend, an equity imperative and a practical pathway to more effective and just resilience.