Steam Summary: Law and Policy Frameworks
Hub Co-Directors: Professor Kirsten Ainley, Australian National University and Professor Laura J. Shepherd, University of Sydney.
The Law and Policy Frameworks (LPF) stream is one of two cross-cutting work streams that underpinned, connected and enhanced thematic streams on the Hub. LPF projects focused on local-international policy linkages, specifically but not exclusively in relation to: Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 on gender equality; SDG 16 on peace, justice and strong institutions; and the United Nations (UN) Security Council Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. While most Hub projects focused on Development Assistance Committee (DAC) list countries and explored development challenges in those settings, the Hub was explicitly designed to include consideration of policies and practices promoted at the international level and their effects in target states in the Global North as well as the Global South.
Development challenges are rarely entirely ‘domestic’ but rather reflect the complex interaction of local, national, regional and global circuits of political, economic and military power. For both SDGs and the WPS agenda, successful implementation requires an alignment between global policy frames and centres of authority (such as the UN itself) and opportunities for change as they exist in context. For example, versions of ‘justice’, ‘accountability’, ‘participation’ or ‘protection’ favoured by donors and international agencies may not coincide with the interpretation of those terms by local civil society or national governments. At the same time, international legal and policy discourses exercise significant influence, and so shape progress towards the SDGs and WPS agenda across thematic areas and national boundaries. The projects in this stream addressed such aspects of the development challenge by gathering robust quantitative and qualitative data on the impacts of donor policies, institutional structures, and funding patterns on transitional justice and WPS, and by examining the record to date of transformative conflict resolution and new gender-sensitive protection policies.
There were five projects within the LPF stream:
- Donor Funding and WPS Implementation (Boer Cueva, Giri, Hamilton and Shepherd), which explored how women’s civil society organisations that are engaged in peace work (often under the auspices of the WPS agenda) in Colombia, Nepal and Northern Ireland experience the funding relationships in which they are embedded.
- Feminist Security Politics (Kirby), which examined the extent and effect of feminist advocacy in transforming traditional security practices both before and after the adoption of the WPS agenda in 2020.
- Funding Transitional Justice (Ainley, Seth, Wiebelhaus-Brahm and Wilmot), which tracked how donors shape the form(s) of transitional justice that materialise at international courts and in societies that have experienced periods of mass violence and repression.
- Gender and Conflict Transformation (Ní Aoláin), which addressed the integration of gender into transformative conflict resolution in complex conflicts, including terrorism and extremism settings, and interrogated Northern Ireland as an apparent site of WPS success.
- Gender and Justice in Sri Lanka (Keenan), which explored key political, ethical and methodological challenges involved in the production of politically actionable knowledge about conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence in Sri Lanka.
Key Findings from the LPF Stream Include:
- Gender is not an “add on” (or a synonym for women). In many cases gender perspectives are still sidelined, gender-disaggregated data is not prioritised, and the assumption is that including women addresses the “gender dimension” of peace and justice processes. Gender needs to be mainstreamed, recognised as a relation of power, and built into policy implementation at the outset. The inclusion of women in peace, justice and security practices should not be assumed to result in feminist outcomes.
- Gendered impacts of policy must be examined. Despite the apparent priority of gender justice and concern for the gendered implications of policy at international levels, too much domestic and international policy and practice still has deeply gendered impacts. shows that the EU’s policy of ‘pullback’ containment in Libya, where migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean are forcefully returned, increases the risk of sexual violence and other abuses. Keenan finds that confronting SGBV in Sri Lanka has been almost impossible despite years of work by civil society organisations, which has culminated in the 2023 Sri Lankan National Action Plan to Address Sexual and Gender-Based Violence. Wiebelhaus-Brahm and Ainley find that the underfunding of reparations provisions in justice processes denies gender-sensitive redress to victim-survivors. N. Aol.in shows that counter terrorism measures impact women and children most acutely, even while notionally targeting men.
- Language matters. Different actors attach different meanings to different things (e.g., peace work, justice, etc.) so for policymaking it is important where possible to ensure/socialise a shared understanding of key concepts, including the meaning of ‘peacetime’ and ‘post-conflict’, as Boer Cueva et al. showi. That said, it is also imperative to maintain a healthy scepticism regarding whether what Kirby and Shepherd call the ‘policy ecosystem’ of WPS can or should be aligned around socialised shared meaningsii. Only by remaining attentive to contestation and fracture can we remain critical of the agenda and its biases and privileges even as we work towards its implementation.
- Silence also matters. Who gets to speak and what do they talk about? What are the silences and contradictions in discussions, for instance, of the WPS agenda? Is anyone talking about, let alone holding to account, donors and their influence on justice processes? To what extent are we complicit in allowing issues to be articulated in ways that lessen the responsibility and obligations of the most powerful actors in the system?
- The local-national-global disconnect must be examined. The domestic and international aspects of key policy frameworks are often not well-connected and local actors are not necessarily finding international frameworks, such as the WPS agenda, useful in their day-to-day work.
- Amplify local voices. In conflict and conflict-affected settings, the organisations doing peace and justice work on the ground are knowledge-holders and should be valued as such. Power imbalances and funding shortages disproportionately impact local organisations, limit their access to decision-making spaces and privilege actors in the Global North. Boer Cueva et al. argue that this is particularly problematic in conflict-affected settings, where grassroots organisations have detailed knowledge of the context and are undertaking critical peace work without stable funding.
- Accountable, transparent, and participatory funding is needed. International actors, particularly donors, have significant influence in justice and reconciliation work carried out post conflict, yet access to data on funding is poor. Recommendations from projects in this stream cluster around accountability: Kirby advocates for adequate infrastructures for monitoring WPS spend and the establishment of mechanisms that will guarantee multi-year core funding to women’s organisations in conflict-affected contexts; and Wiebelhaus-Brahm and Ainley call for increased transparency from donors on how transitional justice decisions are made, robust reporting systems and the alignment of gender and transitional justice strategies so that gender analysis is incorporated into funding decisions. Ní Aoláin argues that the meaningful and sustained prevention of violence requires participatory budget processes, budgeting and allocation of adequate resources in order to strengthen the rule of law, advance accountability and institutionalise human rights.
Related publications
Related Research
Funding Transitional Justice
Donor Funding and WPS Implementation
Feminist Security Politics
