Gender and Resilience

This paper reviews different approaches to incorporating gender equality objectives into resilience projects and to monitoring gender equality outcomes. It uses a sample of project proposals from DFID s Building Resilience to Climate Extremes and Disasters programme (BRACED) and makes suggestions on ways to promote effective and consistent practice across the full range of projects. The analysis of NGO approaches reveals different levels of ambition, from recognising gender-based differences to targeting gendered interests and ultimately transforming gendered power relations. Several challenges were however identified within the gender elements of these projects related to their design, operational feasibility and the practicality of monitoring. The authors set out recommendations for the implementation of resilience-building projects with a gender equality lens, based on examples from the literature and the NGO project documentation. They emphasise in particular the need to analyse the connections between the mini-theories of change concerned with the ambitious goal of transforming gender relations and the overall theory of change for the resilience project as a whole. In doing so, implementing agencies can improve the coherence, gender impact and effectiveness of monitoring approaches.