The New Deal builds on previous international commitments such as the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2008) and the Accra Agenda for Action (2008), and provides new momentum to efforts to support countries making the transition to peace. However, to date, gender issues have been largely absent despite their status as a ‘cross-cutting’ theme, and more political will, guidance and resources are needed to ensure that they are incorporated into the implementation of this important new global agenda.
Gender equality, and women’s participation, is critical to the realisation of some of the central aims of the New Deal, and gender analysis is a valuable tool for unpacking some of the key concepts of inclusion, state-society relations and the power dynamics that are present in these contexts and that feature strongly in the New Deal. The three main components of the New Deal are the Peacebuilding and Statebuilding Goals (PSGs), FOCUS which addresses new ways of engaging, emphasising and supporting transitions that are country-led and country-owned, and TRUST which outlines how resources and aid will be managed more effectively and transparently and how funding will be streamlined to ensure better results. While all of these components reflect issues that women’s organisations have been advocating around over the past decade and that are important in the context of the women, peace and security agenda, they do not currently adequately reflect a gender perspective.
Suggested entry points for integrating gender into the New Deal:
The draft analytical framework that has been developed for the fragility assessment and spectrum highlights a few guiding questions that relate to women’s needs and vulnerabilities, and any final guidance or methodology should ensure to take these into account, including in any workshops and consultation processes. However, it is not clear that gender dynamics are recognised by the fragility assessment framework as one of the drivers of conflict, fragility or resilience. If this were the case, that may lead to a different assessment of fragility and more importantly may offer up new avenues towards resilience. Ensuring that all relevant issues, including those relevant to gender equality, are identified in the assessment report and lessons learned documents during the pilot phase is critical so that there will be a greater likelihood that they will be taken up in national planning processes.
The second entry point for integrating gender into the New Deal is through the development of indicators at the country level which will then feed into a menu of indi-cators at the global level. It is vitally important that the current processes to define indicators for each of the PSGs both engage women, and also that every effort is made to include gender-specific issues under each goal to ensure that these issues are taken on board as measures of success of peacebuilding and statebuilding. As part of the efforts to implement UNSCR 1325, global indicators on women, peace and security issues have been drafted by the UN and the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders, and many countries have also developed country-level indicators for their National Action Plans on UNSCR 1325. These existing indicators cover a range of areas of relevance to the five PSGs, and as such could be directly incorporated into the New Deal framework, which would not only strengthen that process but would also accelerate monitoring of their implementation in relation to UNSCR 1325.
Key recommendations:
- Prioritise women’s voices and strengthen engagement with civil society around implementation of the New Deal
- Link the implementation of the New Deal to existing in-country activities around the implementation of UNSCR 1325, and vice versa
- Apply a gender perspective to all analytical frameworks and approaches used to implement the New Deal
- Integrate gender issues into fragility assessments
- Allocate adequate financing to women’s needs and gender-related priorities
- Ensure that any indicators developed to monitor the PSGs reflect a gender perspective and are sex-disaggregated
- Increase communication and collaboration across government ministries to ensure a more coordinated approach to addressing gender issues in FCAS
