Actionable gender mainstreaming: World Dank development projects in conflict-affected states
Date
2021
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Development, peace, and security are multidimensional and necessitate support and financing from a multiplicity of organizations, including development banks. In 2015 the UN Women led “Global Review” of the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, identified development banks, specifically discussing the World Bank, as “key enablers” of development. As such, the World Bank is poised to steward the priorities of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda as a policy framework, through development projects in fragile and conflict-affected states. ☐ The World Bank works in fragile and conflict-affected contexts with a focus on relief and recovery, and since the 1970s has strived to integrate the needs of women and gendered issues into its work. Given the World Bank’s focus on both women’s inclusion and relief and recovery in conflict-affected situations, it is uniquely positioned to combine these efforts and support the priorities of the WPS agenda, though it is still unclear if it actually does and to what extent. The World Bank integrates its focus on women’s inclusion and needs by mainstreaming gender in development projects. Gender mainstreaming is a policy mechanism is an international strategy conceived by feminists to achieve greater gender equality through policy making. ☐ Addressing the limited investigation of how development financing by the World Bank in conflict-affected contexts promotes Women, Peace and Security, this dissertation works to untangle if and how the World Bank supports the Women, Peace and Security agenda, through financing development projects in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. To support Women, Peace and Security through World Bank financing, the World Bank must mainstream gender in fragile and conflict-affected states. ☐ Through textual analysis, quantitative modeling, and a comparative case study, I analyze World Bank gender mainstreaming activity in the development project documentation of sixteen Sub-Saharan African countries over a 25-year period. I argue current models of assessing gender mainstreaming activity fail to capture the whole of activity taking place. Thus, they are insufficient in adequately and accurately evaluating gender mainstreaming and the potential impact it can have when implemented in development projects in fragile and conflict-affected states. My framework of “Actionable Gender Mainstreaming” presents a better framework and sets a new threshold for implementing and evaluating gender mainstreaming in practice. This framework focuses on identifying actionable items in project plans that produce tangible outcomes meant to disrupt the status quo of gendered inequalities. Through Actionable Gender Mainstreaming the lack of change from 1990-2014 in gender mainstreaming activity is visible, and the activity taking place occurs in less than a third of projects. So, despite the institutional commitment to gender equality, the data illustrates how that commitment has made little difference in the World Bank’s gender mainstreaming activity over this period in these conflict-affected states. The countries with the highest rate of gender mainstreaming activities, Chad, Eritrea, and Rwanda, share a convergence of conditions leading these three cases to stand out from their peers. They also have a higher presence of Actionable Gender Mainstreaming take place within their World Bank development projects.
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Keywords
Gender equality, Mainstreaming, Peace/security, World Bank development, Actionable gender mainstreaming