Insight
May 21, 2026
by Mara Dolan
Coordinator, Policy at WEDO
by Sinéad Magner
Coordinator of Programs and Policy at WEDO
From Extraction to Care: Feminist Reflections from Santa Marta
Coordinator, Policy at WEDO
Coordinator of Programs and Policy at WEDO
Last week, WEDO returned from Santa Marta, Colombia, for the first Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels conference.
The conference included three days of sectoral organizing, a People’s Summit gathering hundreds of civil society members, and two days of high-level dialogues with 57 governments. Six key ideas stand out as we reflect on our experience and what we saw on the ground:
Feminists have consistently engaged with the complexities of the UNFCCC by strategically finding one another at COP to connect and collaborate. These in-person gatherings are vital for movement building, as they provide rare opportunities to meet partners and allied movements from various regions and issue areas. However, these gatherings are also inevitably influenced by the structure of the meetings themselves. Civil society participants follow the formal negotiations, host press conferences, and apply for designated side events. It can be challenging to carve out intentional time for collaboration, and the COP may be the only meeting point available throughout the year.
The Santa Marta conference presented an exciting opportunity for civil society to meet in different ways — to exchange lessons learned, theories of change, and strategies outside the specific work and structure of the UNFCCC. People were able to experiment with strategy roundtables, academic presentations, cultural exchanges, community-building mixers, and more. We gathered regionally and then sectorally, with a full-day People’s Summit bringing hundreds of advocates and activists from across groups: feminists, Indigenous Peoples, Afrodescendants, farmers, youth, unions, social movements, and environmental NGOs. However, unjust visa restrictions, imperialist aggression, and war prevented many advocates, in particular from Africa and Asia, from attending. This framework must be built on and improved to be even more inclusive in the future. Civil society coordination is stronger because of it.
A Feminist Vision Statement for the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels Conference
After months of inputs and an all-day feminist and gender sector convening, this collective statement about the feminist vision for the conference was produced.
The Just Transition Work Programme is one of the few places where we have seen UNFCCC outcomes that place people, rights, and consent firmly at the heart of the transition. Feminists and civil society have long been fiercely engaged in those fights, and we have seen huge justice wins in that space. The Programme’s decision at COP30 institutionalized gender equality, human rights, labor rights, Indigenous rights, and care and informal work as key components of a just transition.
Countries participating in Santa Marta are obligated to adhere to the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement. Yet, currently, justice considerations in this phaseout process risk being an afterthought. Decisions from COPs that center human rights, Indigenous rights, gender transformative approaches, care and informal work, and the just transition must inform conversations on phaseout in this process.
For years, the Kick Big Polluters Campaign has highlighted the outrageous presence of hundreds of fossil fuel lobbyists present and badged at COPs. They shape negotiations and slow progress, representing the antithesis of what countries are gathered there to do, significantly hindering a just energy transition.
While the focus has been on the fossil fuel industry, we know there are many ways to transition away from fossil fuels that could remain unjust, replicating systems of oppression in a world powered by renewable energy.
While it was a welcome reprieve to see a space where fossil fuel lobbyists were unwelcome, civil society must stay alert to the presence of other interests that may be pushing harmful false solutions behind the scenes that would catalyze an unjust transition. Whether it be false solutions like geoengineering or carbon credits, or the concerning lack of human rights considerations around critical minerals mining, or the maintenance of a status quo of trade and debt injustice. We must stay vigilant and guard against these ideologies and policies.
In many conversations about just transition, one topic is notably absent: care. Advocates have sounded the alarm that unless the transition considers the unequal distribution of labor, especially unpaid care work, it will only deepen gender inequality. Every day, 16.4 billion hours of unpaid care work are carried out — 76% of which is carried out by women. This work is unrecognized and excluded from the vast majority of GDP and other economic well-being measurements, absent from national labor and climate policies, and ignored in investments in new jobs in the energy transition.
In Santa Marta, the feminist sector brought a strong analysis around care work to both the civil society-organized spaces and the High-Level Dialogue. Gender sector representatives highlighted the issue in roundtable discussions with governments, where care was not focused on. For the transition to be just, we must end the invisibility of care work in the formal economy and prevent it from acting as an unpaid scaffolding and subsidy to any future renewable energy economy.
A truly just fossil fuel phaseout demands that we loudly and consistently resist the capture of these processes by Global North institutions and their agendas. There is a very real risk that the process that began in Santa Marta will become little more than an opportunity for wealthy countries moving fast on phaseout to showcase their progress, while systematically excluding Southern, Indigenous, and local and frontline actors from shaping the direction and design of the process itself. This goes in direct opposition to the principles of a just transition - and would only result in another failed and foolish attempt to greenwash the very political and economic systems that have brought about the climate crisis in the first place.
Southern institutions and experts bring crucial knowledge and analysis, grounded in lived reality, rather than abstraction, that must guide both the substance of the economic and social transformations we need and the structures and workstreams of the processes pursuing them. Just transition cannot be an outcome if it is not also a methodology. Future conferences must see Southern voices and institutions brought into the formal leadership of all process workstreams.
As we look to the second conference in Tuvalu, it is important that Tuvalu is given genuine space to lead and set the agenda, free from Northern pressure or interference. Tuvalu has long demonstrated visionary leadership in the Pacific and beyond, placing equity firmly at the heart of climate action. To center Pacific leadership is to acknowledge that the communities at the frontline of the climate crisis must be the ones guiding the transition.
As we reflected on before the conference, Santa Marta arrived at a moment where imperial powers had rejected any sense of collective responsibility and accountability in their pursuit of domination and violence. We have emphasized that a just transition means dismantling the systems of militarism and exploitation that sustain them. It is hard to ignore that in the months prior to the convening in Colombia, petromasculine authoritarian leaders have been meeting of their own accord to form “alternative” multilateral spaces to advance war and extraction. Rejecting the existing structures of international law and accountability, they have abandoned UN fora to avoid their obligations to human rights and climate action. These coalitions are dangerous distractions that undermine collective processes.
We need coalitions of the willing - governments able to take action and move forward on climate now. If we move at the pace of progress of fossil fuel hegemons and climate blockers, like the U.S., we will never move at all. Spaces like Santa Marta are crucial for bringing together countries poised to take action, exchanging best practices and lessons learned, and advising one another on equitable transition pathways. These can be crucial spaces of South-South cooperation, technology exchange, knowledge production, and the building of global political will. Many parties in attendance reflected on the space’s innovativeness and the utility of more informal exchanges free from typical agenda-setting and facilitative processes.
But these spaces must remain complementary to the UNFCCC - diving deep in issue or sector areas, gathering regionally or thematically, or focusing on catalyzing specific commitments - without reinventing the wheel. As described before with the Just Transition Work Program, we have years of hard-fought negotiating texts to build from, including on human rights protections in the just transition. We urge countries to consistently affirm how these processes will complement and feed into the UNFCCC. We need many waterways of action and collaboration that all feed into the same river, not reinvention or repetition.
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