From Toolkit to Practice: Revisiting the Gender and Climate Justice CSO Workshop
In June, GenCGov brought together civil society organisations for a two-session Climate and Gender Justice Toolkit Adoption Workshop. The workshop was designed around a simple question:
what does it take to move from recognising the links between climate and gender justice to changing how climate advocacy is actually done?
The starting point was a challenge from GenCGov Principal Investigator Dr. Pedi Obani: climate advocacy can be active, visible and well-funded, while still excluding the people most affected by climate change.
Environmental harm is often visible. Gendered harm can be harder to see. When gender and other intersecting forms of inequality are missing from the diagnosis, they are likely to be missing from the solution too.
From analysis to action
Across the two sessions, participating CSOs examined their own advocacy through a gender and intersectionality lens. The discussions moved beyond why gender matters to the more difficult question of what changes when we take it seriously.
Participants then worked with the GENCGOV Climate and Gender Justice Toolkit to develop practical mini-sessions and toolkit adoption plans tailored to their own organisations and areas of work.
The aim was not simply to add gender language to existing climate advocacy.
It was to reconsider what climate advocacy sees, how it listens, whose experiences shape its priorities, who gets included in decision-making, and how interventions are designed and delivered.
That distinction matters. A toolkit only becomes useful when it changes practice.
 From workshop to implementation
The June workshop was also the starting point for the next phase of the work. Two CSOs selected through the workshop will begin implementing their funded projects, putting the ideas explored during the sessions into practice in their own contexts.
Over the coming weeks, GenCGov will follow that journey, sharing what implementation looks like on the ground, what the organisations learn, and how the Climate and Gender Justice Toolkit is being adapted and applied beyond the workshop room.
The real test of a toolkit is not whether it is read. It is whether it changes what people do.
