Sustaining Peace: Gender, Natural Resources and Climate Change

The new UN Sustaining Peace agenda reconfigures international peace and security intervention away from state­centric perspectives. Instead, the focus is on bottom­up and inclusive initiatives for societies to address the root causes of conflict (UNSC 2020, 17). Driven by the logic that inclusivity is vital for conflict prevention, and informed by the UN Security Council Women, Peace, and Security agenda (WPS), the Sustaining Peace agenda promotes and funds initiatives that advance gender equality (UNSC 2020, 5). Simultaneously, the Sustaining Peace agenda acknowledges the role of natural resources in driving and sustaining conflict and understands that climate change compounds this, and thus proposes to focus on good governance of land and natural resource management in resource dependent countries to avoid violence and insecurity.

The Sustaining Peace agenda brings together gender inclusivity and good governance of natural resources in a new set of conflict prevention initiatives focused on women’s inclusion in natural resource management (NRM) and climate change adaptation. The UN strategic agenda on ‘Gender, Natural Resources, Climate, and Peace’ is framed around two core assumptions: 1) that NRM provides a good opportunity to increase women’s participation in fragile and conflict affected settings, particularly in light of climate shocks and 2) that women’s participation in NRM is necessary to prevent conflict in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. With this project, I propose a deeper critical interrogation of what meanings gender equality and women’s empowerment assume in natural resource and climate change management initiatives in conflict­affected countries and with what consequences for the design of peacebuilding policies.