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(Gendered) resilience in community-based natural resource management in fragile and conflict-affected settings

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Abstract

In so-called ‘fragile and conflict affected settings’ there is an increased focus on strengthening local governance systems for natural resource management as a means of conflict prevention. As exemplified in the World Bank ‘Pathways for Peace’ agenda and the UNEP report on Conflict and Natural Resource Management, this is framed in relation to ‘resilience.’ These reports conceptualise resilience as both a desirable quality that communities should have for conflict-prevention and as a way of describing socio-ecological systems with well-managed natural resources. The paper considers how resilience is gendered and racialised in the assumptions that ‘the local’ is a space that is in need of discipline in relation to natural resources, while ignoring the role of ‘the global’ in natural resource extraction. To demonstrate this, I analyse the framing of ‘good’ natural resource management as facilitating and sustaining ‘resilience’ to conflicts within broad international agendas (such as Pathways for Peace) and how this occurs more specifically in four donor-funded peacebuilding projects directed at community-based natural resource management in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

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Notes

  1. ‘The UN Secretary-General’s Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) is the organization’s financial instrument of first resort to sustain peace in countries or situations at risk or affected by violent conflict. The PBF may invest with UN entities, governments, regional organizations, multilateral banks, national multi-donor trust funds or civil society organizations. From 2006 to 2017, the PBF has allocated $772 million to 41 recipient countries.’ (United Nations Peacebuilding 2021).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the journal's editors for their constructive engagement. I would also like to thank Ana Juncos and Philippe Bourbeau for their work in organizing this special issue and for their feedback and advice. Finally, I am grateful to Pol Bargués for providing extremely constructive advice on multiple versions of this article, and to Maria Martin de Almgro, for the many, many generative conversations that have helped refine my thinking.

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  1. University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Caitlin Ryan

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Ryan, C. (Gendered) resilience in community-based natural resource management in fragile and conflict-affected settings. J Int Relat Dev 25, 902–924 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-022-00273-z

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