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© 2014 Taylor & Francis. This article explores the link between gender representation and climate policy-making in Scandinavia. We ask to what extent equal descriptive representation (critical mass) results in substantive representation (critical acts). Our study shows that women and men are equally represented in administrative and political units involved in climate policy-making, and in some units women are in the majority. However, a text analysis of the outcomes, that is, the Scandinavian climate strategies, reveals a silence regarding gender, further confirmed through interviews. Accordingly, a critical mass of women does not automatically result in gender-sensitive climate policy-making, recognizing established gender differences in material conditions and in attitudes toward climate issues. In interviews, we also note that policy-makers are largely unaware of gender differences on climate issues in the Scandinavian context. We discuss why a critical mass of women in climate policy-making has not led to critical acts and offer alternative explanations informed by feminist IR theory. For example, poststructural feminism claims that masculine norms are deeply institutionalized in climate institutions; hence, policy-makers adapt their actions to the masculinized institutional environment. Thus, substantive representation should be understood in relation to gendered institutional processes.

Transport planning has historically been dominated by masculinity norms with minimal attention to sustainability, but these norms are challenged. Our analytical framework explores municipal solutions to sustainable transport that go beyond traditional norms and advances knowledge on how gendered sustainability norms are articulated in municipal transport policies and planning documents. The article investigates whether masculine and feminine norms on sustainability affect transport planning and if they are concretely expressed in transport solutions in planning and policy documents in Swedish municipalities, considered high achievers in sustainable transport. The article also observes gender representation and political affiliation related to gender sustainability norms. Our results show that all municipal committees that handle transport planning adhere to masculine and feminine sustainability norms but that there are significant differences in the content of the policies. Our results do not verify a relation between norms and the representation of men and women in the transport committees, we find evidence of divergences between masculine and feminine norms in relation to political ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]