Empowerment or Burden? Gendered Transformations of Household Roles under Climate Mobilities in Eastern and Southern Ethiopia

Climate change is reshaping not only livelihoods but also the distribution of power within households. Yet research on climate mobilities often reduces gendered outcomes to binaries of empowerment or vulnerability, obscuring the mechanisms through which power is renegotiated in households that mobilities divide. This article examines how power and agency operate through care, income, and morality as men's mobilities, married women's stretched labour, and young women's urban wage work reorganise household life. It draws on multi-sited qualitative fieldwork in Ethiopia's pastoralist Somali and agrarian Sidama regions, comprising 25 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2022 and 2024, analysed through feminist and Foucauldian perspectives. Evidence from the two sites suggests that mobilities under compound climatic and structural stress redistribute rather than determine gendered power. Women who remain combine childcare, farming, and petty trade while men move seasonally or withdraw from work amid recurrent drought; informal and unreliable remittances shift everyday budgeting authority to women while intensifying financial risk, emotional strain, and care burdens; and, in Sidama, young women entering urban industrial employment gain income and limited autonomy only so long as they remit and conform to moral codes of respectability. These ambivalent outcomes – expanded responsibilities without durable empowerment – show that gendered power under climate stress is relational, conditional, and morally regulated. Policy should therefore move beyond static categories of “vulnerable women” by reducing remittance frictions, building on women's existing savings collectives, and expanding care-compatible employment.