International climate institutions, with the UNFCCC and the EU in the forefront, have in recent years highlighted intersectional social dimensions of climate change and the need to address climate justice. This is encouraging and might mean a transformative shift in institutional practices and discourses away from framing climate change primarily as a masculine natural science problem with western based techno-economic solutions.  Based on feminist research on international institutions we however also know that formal commitments, e.g., to gender equality, do not necessarily translate into transformative actions. In this article we discuss how international climate institutions can draw lessons from feminist scholarship- feminist IR and institutionalism- for developing reflective institutional practices needed for socially inclusive and just climate policies. We suggest that feminist approaches are useful for identifying existing path-dependent power relations within international climate institutions, which might be reinforcing current practices and excluding new knowledge and approaches. Finally, we suggest that the feminist literature is a useful institutional tool for highlighting another kind of life and another way of living together, one that is geared more towards well-being and social equity.