From Rhetoric to Resourcing: Why the Quad Must Build a Robust Women, Peace, and Security Program Now

Indo-Pacific Outlook | Volume 2, Issue 1

by Linh Dieu Nong

Abstract

The Quad has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, yet financing patterns across the Indo-Pacific remain fragmented, short-term, and politically volatile. This policy brief argues that the central obstacle to effective WPS implementation is not lack of endorsement, but institutional design, specifically, how power and resources are structured. Drawing on feminist political economy and evidence from peacebuilding and humanitarian financing, the brief shows how project-based funding and compliance-driven accountability contribute to policy evaporation, weakening transformative impact. It proposes a shift toward feminist financing as redistribution: embedding multi-year core funding, establishing regional pooled mechanisms, strengthening crisis-response modalities, and supporting knowledge production led by Indo-Pacific actors. By redesigning financial architecture rather than reiterating commitments, the Quad can build a more durable, credible, and politically grounded WPS program.

“By redesigning financial architecture rather than reiterating commitments, the Quad can build a more durable, credible, and politically grounded WPS program.”

Executive Summary

The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda is firmly embedded in global policy discourse and widely endorsed as a cornerstone of sustainable peace and security. Since the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, governments and multilateral institutions have repeatedly affirmed that women’s participation, gender equality, and the protection of civilians are integral to conflict prevention, peacebuilding, and recovery. The Quad is no exception: all four member states publicly support WPS principles and reference them across foreign, development, and security policy statements.^[a]

Yet this normative consensus has not translated into commensurate material outcomes. Across the Indo-Pacific, women and gender-diverse people continue to experience deepening insecurity driven by armed conflict, democratic backsliding, climate-related disasters, economic precarity, and shrinking civic space. Feminist actors are central to responding to these challenges yet remain systematically under-resourced and marginalized within dominant security and aid architectures. The resulting gap between commitment and practice is not episodic; it is structural.

This brief starts from the premise that WPS implementation failures are not primarily caused by a lack of political endorsement or technical capacity, but by how power and resources are organized. Feminist scholarship has long demonstrated that gender commitments are especially vulnerable to dilution as they pass through bureaucratic systems, a process often described as policy evaporation. More recent feminist political economy and decolonial analyses extend this critique, showing how financing modalities, accountability systems, and epistemic heirarchies shape whose knowledge counts, who decides, and what forms of peacebuilding are sustained.

Against this backdrop, the brief examines why the Quad’s current approaches to WPS remain fragile, and why geopolitical volatility has further exposed the limits of short-term, projectized, and compliance-driven funding models. It argues that moving from rhetorical alignment to durable impact requires reimagining WPS not as a thematic add-on, but as an institutional design challenge.

This brief therefore advances a central claim: a robust Quad WPS program must be built around feminist financing as redistribution of resources, decision-making authority, and epistemic power. Rather than proposing incremental adjustments, it outlines how feminist financing modalities can be operationalized at scale to stabilize feminist peacebuilding capacity, resist policy evaporation, and insulate WPS commitments from political volatility in the Indo-Pacific.

What’s Structurally Wrong? WPS, the Indo-Pacific, and Global Volatility

Normative Commitment, Material Fragility

Despite the widespread institutionalization of Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) commitments, implementation remains materially fragile. Global evidence consistently points to a central weakness: the absence of sustained, politically protected financing to support women’s participation, protection, and leadership in peace and security processes.^[1]

Recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and United Nations (UN) analyses show that less than one per cent of bilateral aid to fragile and conflict-affected settings is allocated to gender equality as a principal objective, even though women’s participation is repeatedly associated with more durable peace outcomes.^[2] In peace processes specifically, funding for women’s rights organizations remains marginal, episodic, and highly projectized, often disconnected from the long-term political work required to influence negotiations, sustain ceasefires, or rebuild trust.^[3]

This financing gap renders WPS commitments particularly vulnerable to political volatility. Where resources are not embedded in core budgetary frameworks or protected through multi-year allocations, they are easily displaced by shifting security priorities, fiscal tightening, or crisis-driven reallocation. Comparative reviews of WPS National Action Plans and donor strategies demonstrate that commitments without dedicated budgets are especially prone to erosion during periods of political or economic stress.^[4]

The problem, therefore, is not a lack of policy endorsement, but the failure to translate normative commitments into durable financial architecture. Without sustained resourcing, WPS remains exposed to dilution at precisely the moment when demand for feminist peacebuilding is intensifying.^[5]

The Indo-Pacific Context

The Indo-Pacific region presents a particularly compelling case for renewed WPS investment. It encompasses protracted armed conflicts, fragile political transitions, intensifying climate-related disasters, and growing authoritarianism. These dynamics intersect to produce gendered insecurity at scale, disproportionately affecting women and gender-diverse people while constraining civic space for feminist organizing.^[6]

In contexts such as Myanmar, women’s organizations have played central roles in humanitarian response, community protection, documentation of human rights abuses, and resistance to military rule, often at significant personal risk. In the Pacific, women confront intersecting insecurities linked to climate change, gender-based violence, and exclusion from political decision-making. Across South and Southeast Asia, shrinking civic space and restrictive legal environments have constrained feminist organizing even as demand for such work has intensified.^[7]

Despite this centrality, feminist peacebuilding in the Indo-Pacific remains chronically under-resourced. Available data indicate that women-led and women’s rights organizations receive a disproportionately small share of peace, security, and humanitarian funding, particularly in comparison to state-centric or militarized security responses.^[8] Where funding is available, it is frequently short-term, narrowly targeted, and tied to donor-defined priorities rather than locally articulated strategies. This mismatch undermines both effectiveness and legitimacy, weakening trust between institutions and the communities they seek to support.

The Quad’s Uneven WPS Architectures

Within this regional context, the Quad’s approach to WPS is characterized by normative alignment but institutional unevenness. Each member state has endorsed WPS principles, yet levels of institutionalization, financing, and political commitment vary significantly.

Australia has articulated strong rhetorical support for WPS and gender equality, including through successive National Action Plans and broader feminist policy commitments. However, independent reviews highlight persistent fragmentation across government departments and inconsistent integration of WPS objectives into defense, diplomacy, and development planning.^[9] Funding modalities continue to prioritize short-term projects over long-term movement support, limiting strategic impact.

Japan has been a prominent international advocate for WPS, yet entrenched gender hierarchies within domestic political and bureaucratic institutions continue to shape implementation. Women remain significantly underrepresented in decision-making, and aid programming often emphasizes top-down stability and service delivery rather than feminist or movement-led change.^[10]

India’s growing influence as a development and security actor adds further complexity. Its development cooperation is expanding rapidly under a South–South framework that emphasizes partnership and mutual benefit. However, gender equality is frequently framed through welfare or empowerment narratives rather than as a structural question of power and rights, and feminist perspectives are not yet systematically embedded in India’s peace and security engagement.^[11]

The United States remains a central actor in WPS norm-setting and financing, but its commitment has proven highly sensitive to domestic political shifts. Changes in administration have repeatedly reshaped foreign policy priorities, exposing WPS financing to volatility and uncertainty.^[12] This volatility has ripple effects across the global aid system, given the United States’ outsized role in development and humanitarian financing.

Geopolitical Volatility and the Limits of Current Financing Models

Recent disruptions to global aid systems have highlighted the limitations of existing WPS financing models. Political volatility, fiscal pressure, and competing security priorities have exposed the fragility of funding arrangements that rely on short-term, discretionary allocations rather than institutionalized budget lines.^[13] These dynamics have had disproportionate impacts on women’s rights organizations, particularly in conflict-affected and humanitarian settings where predictable support is essential for safety, continuity, and effectiveness.

Evidence from humanitarian financing shows that women-led organizations are often first responders but last funded, receiving smaller, shorter, and more restricted grants than larger international actors.^[14] At the same time, global military expenditure continues to rise, underscoring the imbalance between investments in militarized security and resources dedicated to gender-responsive peacebuilding.^[15]

Taken together, these conditions create both risk and opportunity for the Quad. The risk is that WPS continues to function primarily as a rhetorical signal affirmed in statements but weakened in practice by fragmented funding and technocratic delivery models. The opportunity is for the Quad to leverage its collective influence to build a WPS program that is structurally resilient, politically credible, and grounded in the realities of feminist peacebuilding in the Indo-Pacific.

Recognizing WPS as a political and economic question rather than a thematic add-on opens the door to a different approach. Feminist financing offers a framework for translating normative commitment into material redistribution by prioritizing long-term, flexible funding, movement governance, and power-aware accountability. The sections that follow examine why current approaches fall short and outline how the Quad could operationalize a more robust WPS program.

Why WPS Implementation Failure Matters: Policy Evaporation in WPS Financing

How Gender Commitments Lose Substance

The persistent gap between Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) commitments and their implementation reflects a recurring pattern in gender policy often described as policy evaporation. Feminist development scholars have long observed that gender equality commitments frequently enter institutions with transformative intent but lose political force as they are absorbed into existing bureaucratic and power structures.^[16] In the WPS domain, this pattern has been documented across national action plans, donor strategies, and multilateral implementation frameworks.^[17]

“Where WPS objectives are not embedded in core budgetary processes, they remain particularly vulnerable during periods of fiscal tightening or policy realignment.”

One key driver of policy evaporation is financial ambiguity. Comparative assessments of WPS National Action Plans show that many are adopted without dedicated or ring-fenced budgets, leaving implementation dependent on discretionary funding decisions and shifting political priorities.^[18] Where WPS objectives are not embedded in core budgetary processes, they remain particularly vulnerable during periods of fiscal tightening or policy realignment. Recent OECD and UN reviews confirm that even where WPS commitments are formally articulated, funding allocations often remain fragmented, short-term, or opaque.^[19]

A second driver lies in bureaucratic incentive structures. Public institutions and donor agencies tend to privilege activities that are easily measured, reported, and aggregated, such as trainings, workshops, and awareness-raising initiatives over interventions that challenge power relations or redistribute authority. Research on gender mainstreaming demonstrates that this emphasis on technocratic outputs frequently shifts attention away from political transformation toward procedural compliance.^[20] In practice, institutions can demonstrate visible activity on gender while leaving underlying hierarchies intact.^[21]

Third, epistemic hierarchies shape what is recognized as valid knowledge within WPS implementation. Large-scale mapping of the WPS policy ecosystem shows that donor-driven indicators and evaluation frameworks privilege quantitative, externally defined evidence while marginalizing the lived experience, political analysis, and movement knowledge of women in conflict-affected contexts.^[22]This filtering effect narrows what becomes legible to institutions and reinforces top-down approaches to defining both problems and solutions.

Taken together, these dynamics produce a form of WPS implementation that is visible but shallow. Commitments are acknowledged, activities are delivered, and reports are produced, yet the structural conditions that limit women’s meaningful participation and leadership remain largely unchanged. The result is action without transformation, an outcome that reflects institutional comfort rather than feminist ambition.

The Limits of Project-Based Approaches

Project funding remains the dominant modality through which WPS commitments are operationalized. While projects can support discrete activities and pilot initiatives, a growing body of evidence shows that they are poorly suited to the relational, adaptive, and long-term work required for peacebuilding and feminist movement strengthening.^[23]

Short funding cycles are a central constraint. Peacebuilding processes unfold over years, often decades, yet WPS interventions are commonly funded on annual or two-to-three-year timelines. Empirical studies of gender and peace financing demonstrate that such timeframes limit organizations’ ability to sustain advocacy, build trust with communities, or adapt strategies in response to political shifts.^[24] They also incentivize conservative programming focused on deliverables rather than innovation, risk-taking, or structural change.

Rigid deliverables and narrowly defined indicators further undermine effectiveness. Feminist organizations consistently report that project logframes – linear results frameworks designed for predictability and measurement – struggle to capture relational change, informal influence, and movement-building outcomes, core elements of feminist peace work.^[25] As a result, organizations are often pressured to prioritize activities that “count” within donor systems over those that matter most for long-term transformation. This dynamic reinforces technocratic approaches to WPS while sidelining political and contextual analysis.

Projectization also externalizes risk downward. Donors typically retain strategic and reputational control while expecting local organizations to absorb political, security, and operational risks, particularly in conflict-affected and shrinking civic-space contexts. Evidence from feminist funding and humanitarian research shows that this often occurs without adequate resourcing for staff wellbeing, security, or organizational resilience.^[26] Over time, such arrangements contribute to burnout, staff attrition, and organizational fragility among women’s rights organizations.^[27]

The cumulative effect is a weakened feminist ecosystem operating under conditions of chronic precarity. Organizations become locked into cycles of short-term survival, limiting their capacity for sustained peacebuilding, policy influence, and movement coordination.

If the Quad’s engagement with WPS relies primarily on project-based modalities, it risks reproducing these dynamics regardless of rhetorical ambition. Without changes to how resources are structured, governed, and accounted for, WPS commitments are likely to continue evaporating at the point of implementation.

What to Build Instead: Feminist Financing for Durable WPS

Taken together, these dynamics suggest that WPS implementation failures are not accidental or technical, but structural. They stem from financing modalities that prioritize control over continuity, measurement over meaning, and donor authority over movement agency. Addressing policy evaporation therefore requires more than improving project design or coordination; it requires rethinking the underlying logic of how WPS is resourced.

“…these dynamics suggest that WPS implementation failures are not accidental or technical, but structural.”

Feminist Financing as Redistribution

Reversing policy evaporation requires more than improved efficiency; it demands the redistribution of both financial and epistemic power. Feminist financing reframes funding not as charity or project support but as a political act of solidarity that reallocates resources toward those who create structural change.^[28]

This approach builds on feminist economics, which recognizes unpaid care and community labor as foundational to peace and development.^[29] It also aligns with decolonial feminist frameworks that treat resourcing as a question of justice rather than delivery. Decolonial scholarship emphasizes that such practice transforms who defines value, whose labor is remunerated, and whose knowledge is centered within development systems.^[30]

A feminist financing framework for WPS within the Quad therefore needs to meet three interrelated objectives: ensuring movement autonomy, fostering relational accountability, and embedding long-term sustainability. These objectives translate into distinct funding modalities outlined below.

Core and Flexible Funding for Feminist Movements

Core and flexible funding remains the cornerstone of feminist financing. Global analyses show that when feminist organizations control their budgets, they are better able to pivot in crisis, sustain staff, and maintain advocacy continuity, while project-based funding fragments work and reinforces donor-driven priorities.^[31]

Quad donors including Australia, the United States, and Japan have the institutional capacity to embed multi-year core funding within their bilateral aid portfolios. Comparable global models demonstrate the feasibility of such approaches when paired with participatory governance and explicit gender allocation targets.^[32] Evidence from pooled peacebuilding instruments shows that gender-responsive allocations increase significantly where targets and inclusive decision-making are institutionalized, including cases where nearly half of disbursements supported gender equality objectives.^[33]

Such funding should explicitly resource feminist infrastructure, including coordination networks, research, and policy advocacy. Evidence from gender-transformative evaluation shows that structural change emerges from relational processes rather than discrete projects, and that core funding enables organizations to define their own indicators of resilience and success.^[34]

Feminist Pooled Funds and Regional Mechanisms

Regional feminist funds demonstrate the viability of movement-led resourcing. Funds operating in Asia and the Pacific have shown that small, flexible grants can reach grassroots actors directly, though these mechanisms remain significantly under-capitalized relative to mainstream development finance.^[35]

The Quad could play a catalytic role by establishing or replenishing a regional Indo-Pacific Feminist Fund, governed by feminist movements and supported through pooled contributions from member states. Such a mechanism would operationalize calls for redistributing epistemic authority by locating grant-making decisions with regional feminist leaders rather than Northern bureaucracies.^[36]

To ensure downward accountability, governance could incorporate peer review, knowledge exchange, and participatory evaluation. Aligning such a fund with existing regional platforms, including ASEAN’s Regional Plan of Action on WPS and Pacific regional gender initiatives would reduce duplication while signaling collective commitment to feminist regionalism.^[37]

Feminist Financing for Crisis and Conflict Contexts

WPS implementation in the Indo-Pacific frequently unfolds in fragile and conflict-affected settings, including Myanmar and Papua New Guinea. In these contexts, feminist organizations operate on the front lines of humanitarian response and peacebuilding yet remain among the last to receive sustained funding.^[38] Evidence from humanitarian research shows that women’s organizations consistently fill gaps left by formal systems, often with minimal resourcing.^[39]

A feminist crisis-response modality would prioritize direct, flexible, and rapid disbursement to local women’s rights organizations, bypassing unnecessary intermediaries wherever possible. Such mechanisms should resource protection, care work, organizational continuity, and advocacy, recognizing feminist leadership as central to both security and recovery.^[40]

Evidence from localization research underscores that rhetorical commitments are insufficient without genuine power transfer. Donors that allocate defined shares of humanitarian and peacebuilding funding directly to feminist actors and sustain this support over multiple years, achieve stronger recovery and resilience outcomes.^[41]

At the same time, evidence shows that value-based intermediaries can play a critical role in enabling redistribution where direct funding is constrained. Practice-based reviews demonstrate that intermediaries grounded in trust-based, power-aware accompaniment can translate donor requirements without imposing them on smaller partners, while holding relational and political complexity.^[42]However, compliance frameworks can undermine efforts to redistribute power if risk is simply devolved downward. Effective localization therefore requires donors to invest in time, relationships, and shared responsibility.^[43]

Integrating Feminist Monitoring and Evaluation

Transformative financing requires equally transformative evaluation. Conventional monitoring systems privilege quantitative outputs and upward accountability, often obscuring shifts in power, learning, and movement resilience. Feminist and decolonial evaluation scholarship instead emphasizes power-aware accountability, which assesses how institutions share or withhold decision-making authority.^[44]

Evaluation frameworks should therefore track indicators such as partner autonomy, proportion of core funding, and degree of participation in design and review processes. Participatory methods, including narrative inquiry, feminist storytelling, and collective reflection are particularly effective in documenting relational and political change that standard metrics overlook.^[45]

The Role of Knowledge and Research Partnerships

Epistemic redistribution requires rethinking how knowledge production is funded and valued. Donor-driven research models often extract data from feminist movements without resourcing their analytical labor, reproducing dependency and hierarchies of expertise.^[46]

Feminist financing should therefore include dedicated budgets for movement-led research, evaluation, and knowledge translation. Research partnerships between women’s rights organizations, universities, and policy institutions should be grounded in co-creation, shared authorship, and shared control over resources and outputs.^[47]

By financing knowledge in this way, Quad members would move beyond supporting women as beneficiaries toward recognizing them as theorists, analysts, and policymakers. This shift directly challenges hierarchies of expertise and positions the Indo-Pacific as a producer of knowledge and policy insight rather than merely a recipient of externally defined frameworks.^[48]

Conclusion: Robustness Requires Redistribution

This paper has argued that the core challenge facing the Quad’s Women, Peace, and Security commitments is not one of intent, visibility, or normative alignment, but of institutional design. As long as WPS continues to be implemented through fragmented, short-term, and compliance-heavy financing modalities, its transformative ambitions will remain vulnerable to dilution, volatility, and instrumentalization.

“…the core challenge facing the Quad’s Women, Peace, and Security commitments is not one of intent, visibility, or normative alignment, but of institutional design.”

The design choices set out in this paper are therefore corrective rather than additive. They respond directly to the structural dynamics that have consistently weakened WPS implementation: projectization, upward accountability, epistemic exclusion, and the chronic under-resourcing of feminist movements. By reimagining feminist financing as a form of redistribution, the proposed modalities seek to align WPS resourcing with the realities of peacebuilding, crisis response, and long-term social transformation in the Indo-Pacific.

Importantly, these proposals do not assume ideal conditions. Institutional inertia, risk aversion, and geopolitical pressure are enduring features of foreign and security policy environments. The question is not whether such constraints exist, but whether WPS programs are designed to absorb or resist them. The evidence presented here suggests that durability depends less on procedural safeguards than on who holds power when trade-offs arise, particularly in moments of crisis, fiscal pressure, or political change.

For the Quad, this implies a strategic choice. Continuing to support WPS through dispersed projects and symbolic commitments risks perpetuating the very patterns of policy evaporation that have undermined the agenda to date. By contrast, investing in feminist financing modalities that redistribute authority, stabilize movement infrastructure, and center knowledge generated by Indo-Pacific actors and institutions offers a pathway to more credible, resilient, and politically grounded WPS leadership.

At a moment of global uncertainty and intensifying regional insecurity, such an approach would signal that the Quad understands WPS not merely as a set of principles to endorse, but as a political and economic commitment to sustain. Designing for redistribution, rather than declaration, is what will ultimately determine whether WPS endures in practice across the Indo-Pacific.

Linh Dieu Nong is a Senior Program Manager at the International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA).

This publication is part of a project on “Women, Peace, and Security in the Quad’s Commitment to a Free and Open Indo-Pacific” that was made possible by a grant from the Japan Foundation.

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Center for Indo-Pacific Affairs or any organization with which the author is affiliated.

^[a] As of 2025, shifts in U.S. foreign policy priorities under the current administration have introduced renewed uncertainty regarding multilateral engagement, foreign assistance allocations, and the institutional positioning of gender equality within security policy. While statutory frameworks supporting WPS remain in place, funding levels and implementation priorities are subject to executive discretion, reinforcing the structural volatility discussed in this brief.

^[1] Jacqui True and Sara E. Davies, “Follow the Money: Assessing Women, Peace and Security through Financing for Gender-Inclusive Peace,” Review of International Studies 48 (4), 2022, 668–689.

^[2] OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), Aid in Support of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, OECD Publishing, 2024; UN Women, Progress of the World’s Women 2023–2024: Gender Equality in Times of Crisis, 2024.

^[3] UN Women, Women’s Participation in Peace Processes: What We Know, 2022; Christine Bell and Catherine O’Rourke, “Peace Agreements or Pieces of Paper? The Impact of UNSC Resolution 1325 on Peace Processes and Their Agreements,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 59 (4), 2010, 941–980.

^[4] OECD, Development Co-operation Report 2025: Global Volatility and Aid Architecture, OECD Publishing, 2025; UN Women, Global Study on the Implementation of UNSCR 1325, UN Women, 2015.

^[5] Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd, “The Futures Past of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda,” International Affairs 92 (2), 2020, 373–392.

^[6]UN Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 2023–2024, 2024.

^[7] CIVICUS, State of Civil Society Report 2024, 2024.

_^[8] Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) and Mama Cash, Moving More Money to the Drivers of Change, AWID and Mama Cash, 2020.

^[9] Natasha Sharland, Australia’s Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Progress and Pitfalls, Lowy Institute, 2021.

^[10] OECD, Gender Equality in Japan: Policy Brief, OECD Publishing, 2024.

^[11] Shirin M. Rai, Gender and the Political Economy of Development in India, Cambridge University Press, 2019.

^[12] RAND Corporation, The U.S. Role in Advancing the Women, Peace and Security Agenda, 2023.

^[13] OECD, Development Co-operation Report 2025: Global Volatility and Aid Architecture, OECD Publishing, 2025.

^[14] UN Women, At a Breaking Point: The Impact of Foreign Aid Cuts on Women’s Organisations in Humanitarian Crises Worldwide, 2025.

^[15] Xiao Liang, Nan Tian, Diego Lopes da Silva, et al., Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2024, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 2025.

^[16] Sara Hlupekile Longwe, “The Evaporation of Gender Policies in the Patriarchal Cooking Pot,” Development in Practice 7 (2), 1997, 148–156.

^[17] True and Davies, “Follow the Money.”

^[18] Jacqui True and Sara E. Davies, Women, Peace and Security National Action Plans: From Rhetoric to Implementation, UN Women, 2020.

^[19] OECD DAC, Financing Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, OECD Publishing, 2024.

^[20] Adrienne Brown, “Including Women in Development Planning: Illusions of Inclusion in Tanzania,” Third World Quarterly 27 (5), 2006, 833–850.

^[21] Judy Wu, “Doing Good and Feeling Good: How Narratives in Development Stymie Gender Equality in Organisations,” Third World Quarterly 43 (3), 2022, 634–650.

^[22] Kirby and Shepherd, “The Futures Past of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda.”

^[23] Claire Batliwala and Deepa Dhanraj, “Gender Myths That Instrumentalise Women: A View from the Indian Frontline,” Institute of Development Studies (IDS) Bulletin 35 (4), 2004, 11–18.

^[24] Jacqui True and Sara E. Davies, “Gender, Peace and Security: Feminist Perspectives on Implementation,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 23 (4), 2021, 567–589.

^[25] Naomi MacArthur, Naomi Carrard, and Juliet Willetts, “Exploring Gendered Change: Concepts and Trends in Gender Equality Assessments,” Third World Quarterly 42 (9) 2021, 2189–2208.

^[26] AWID and Mama Cash, Moving More Money to the Drivers of Change.

^[27] UN Women, At a Breaking Point.

^[28] Longwe, “The Evaporation of Gender Policies in the Patriarchal Cooking Pot.”

^[29] Diane Elson, “Recognize, Reduce, and Redistribute Unpaid Care Work,” UN Women Discussion Paper, 2017; Rai, Gender and the Political Economy of Development.

^[30] Salmah E.-L. Lawrence, “Decolonial Feminism and the Politics of Knowledge,” in Engendering Global
Governance, Routledge, 2025.

^[31] AWID and Mama Cash, Moving More Money to the Drivers of Change.

^[32] Equality Fund, Model and Governance Framework, 2022.

^[33] WPS–Humanitarian Action Compact, Annual Monitoring Report, 2024.

^[34] MacArthur, Carrard, and Willetts, “Exploring Gendered Change.”

^[35] Prospera – International Network of Women’s Funds, Impact Report, 2022.

^[36] Lawrence, “Decolonial Feminism and the Politics of Knowledge.”

^[37] ASEAN Secretariat, Regional Plan of Action on Women, Peace and Security, 2023.

^[38] UN Women, At a Breaking Point.

^[39] KC, Women’s Organisations in Crisis Response, 2022.

^[40] UN Women, Progress of the World’s Women, 2024.

^[41] Akua Asante, “Localisation and Power Transfer in Humanitarian Financing,” Development Policy Review, 2024.