At the 2025 WIN WIN Gothenburg Sustainability Award, this year’s winners, Uyunkar Domingo Peas and Juan Pierre, reminded us how leadership rooted in courage and community can inspire collective action. Their words set the tone for what comes next: the announcement of the 2026 theme — Gender Equal Societies.

The theme could not be more urgent. Around the world, gender and reproductive rights are under attack, funding for feminist organisations is shrinking, and anti-gender and anti-rights rhetoric are on the rise. At the same time, hope is visible in young feminists leading transformative change, in communities resisting extractivism, and in the public demand for equality and climate action.

WECF is proud to contribute to the award through the expertise of our colleague Hanna Gunnarsson, who has been invited to serve as expert advisor to the youth jury in 2026. Together with researcher Martin Hultman, she co-wrote and delivered the keynote announcing the new theme. Their perspectives — from academia and from feminist civil society mobilisation at the UN — underlined why gender-equal societies are fundamental to just and sustainable futures.

This role complements WECF’s ongoing work to highlight and support community-led feminist solutions, such as through our Gender Just Climate Solutions Award. Both awards signal something vital: that in times of backlash, recognition and resources for feminist movements are not symbolic gestures, but essential for building the transformative societies we need.

This commitment to centering feminist solutions echoed in the keynote speech announcing the 2026 theme, Gender Equal Societies:

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

These were the words of Arundhati Roy.

We are living through unprecedented times. The world is already experiencing the impacts of crossing 1.5°C warming. Biodiversity loss from extractivism is ongoing. Authoritarianism is gaining ground globally. Democracy is under attack. 

Civic space is narrowing as coordinated anti-rights ecosystems seek to delegitimise equality, climate action, and human rights. Anti-gender ideologies and climate denial increasingly travel together: they share influences, talking points, and tactics. They rely on disinformation and pseudo-science that erode information integrity and polarise public debate. 

And as we have seen in Swedish politics this very week, with a woman political leader stepping down — it is reshaping our democracies. What was considered unacceptable ten years ago has now been normalised — climate denialism, anti-gender rhetoric, and racism.

Who pays the price? Young women and gender-diverse people, whose futures are stolen. Communities whose sexual and reproductive health and rights are under attack. And civil society itself — women’s rights, feminist, climate, LGBTQI+, and racial justice organisations — starved of funding at the very moment they are needed the most.

How did we get here?

“Drill, baby drill”

Those were Donald Trump’s words as he recently once again rose to power supported by oil- and gas sectors. And we have seen how petro-states — such as Azerbaijan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United States and Venezuela — run by males are decisively shaping global politics.

Professor Cara Daggett has coined the term “petro-masculinities” when analysing how structures and values shape identities. It describes both the nature of the fossil fuel industry — where nearly 78% of workers, and 83% of senior management, are men — and its norms. 

The industry, the governments that prop it up, and the climate governance systems that fail to challenge it, are all deeply petro-masculinised. And they are empowered by the simple fact that 80% of global energy trade still relies on fossil fuels.

But the fossil industry is not the only problem. 

At the same time, we have been sold “solutions” that are no solutions at all. We call it ecomodernism and our feminist colleagues in the climate negotiations call them dangerous distractions. 

Market fixes, techno-optimism, geo-engineering fantasies. 

Putting a small band-aid on a deep wound. They don’t touch the root of the crisis, and so they only buy time while the damage spreads.

The root issue is simple, but profound: historically we have built systems on the belief that white petro-males are worth more than all other life on earth. Indigenous knowledge has always told us otherwise: that we should take only as much as the environment allows, and that we must give back as much as we take. Ignoring that we, humans, also are nature in need of care is how we arrived here.

What gives us hope today?

Yes, we live in unprecedented, challenging times. But it is not the full story. 

We know from Indigenous knowledge that history is not linear. 

We know from racial justice movements that the road to justice is never straight. 

We know from technological innovation trajectories that unforeseen horizons can open up. 

We know from ecosystems that they can be restored if taken care of.  

We also know that public opinion is on our side.

Nearly nine in ten people worldwide want stronger climate action, and most support more gender-equal societies. We’ve seen glimpses of this in practice through feminist leaders who reshaped politics and possibilities. These include Ada Calau (Barcelona), Marianne Borgen (Oslo), Sanna Marin (Finland) and Marama Davidson (Aotearoa/New Zealand) and is still aimed for by Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (Mexico).

From the Chipko women in India, to Berta Cáceres and the Lenca people in Honduras, to queer Indigenous Sami in Sweden, to Indigenous and rural women in the Philippines resisting extractivism — movements of the Global Majority have long defended land, water, and life itself. 

Today, young feminists are leading struggles for reproductive rights, decolonial transformation, and the freedom to live without violence or oppression.

But to move this work truly forward, we must go beyond the binary of women and men. 

Gender is lived and expressed in many ways, just as privilege and power are exercised in many forms. And when we understand that gender equality is inseparable from the possibility of a thriving planet, we also ensure that people of all identities and backgrounds can join together in building a world free from oppression.

We have inherited a path of transformation. From forests defended, to rivers protected, to bodies refusing silence. From women planting trees, to youth striking for climate, to people marching for Black lives, Palestine, Sudan, Congo, for freedom and dignity. 

These movements remind us: across generations, across continents, the will for change is stronger than climate obstruction, and the demand for equality is louder than repression.  

Why is this award important?

The coming theme of the WIN WIN Award could not arrive at a more urgent time. It is a bold voice defending the gains we have made, when others would take them away. 

For feminists of all colours, shape, capacities and gender such recognition is not symbolic — it is for many parts of how life is sustained. 

For researchers from all disciplines with various focus — it is an important motivator when gender studies are dismissed as elitist and non-scientific scholarship. 

For communities and organisations who work with these issues everyday it is an opportunity for visibility, building networks and stabilising their core capacities. 

Last, but not least, this award is part of an historical trend of rights recognitions for all humans — a trend that activates hope among the youths of today across the globe.  

For us, this theme means transformative justice, for everyone, not just women. If we do not change together there will be even more polarisation and we will move further away from sustainability than ever. 

Gender equity means redistributive justice. Breaking down the barriers for those furthest left behind, and rejecting the global inequalities that keep growing around us. This strengthens all of us — because gender-transformative change builds communities and democracies that work for everyone.

What role can you play?

Earlier this month the “Planetary Health Check 2025”, showed that seven out of nine planetary boundaries have now been breached. People in this room have the resources, capacities and knowledge to make a difference today — if not, we will leave the corridor of life as we know it. 

IPCC and IPBES who gather some of the best scholarship on our Earth say it loud and clear — societal transformation is crucial. Gender equality is at the core of such transformation, now and into the future. 

The rights we hold today were not given to us freely. They were won and defended by generations before us. That is especially true for gender rights. And now, it is our turn to carry that vision forward.

Apply now: https://www.winwinaward.org/theme-2026