Description
International peacebuilding efforts are increasingly focused on the pursuit of inclusive practices to enable good governance for sustainable peace. Despite this, the UN Secretary General has noted that an absence of dedicated and accessible funding for inclusive peace initiatives remains one of the key challenges impacting the meaningful realisation of peace (2020). Responsive, sustained, and transparent resourcing of youth and women led peacebuilding initiatives is critical for ensuring that Member States simultaneously fulfil their obligations to these inclusive Agendas. However, as demonstrated in this paper, the current hyper competitive funding landscape creates an environment which obscures complementarity, nurturing duplication and overlap. This in turn creates cycles of exclusion for both women and youth, particularly those in rural and remote areas. Drawing on examples from international donor programs, this paper highlights the importance of reconceptualising notions of political will for the pursuit of more inclusive governance structures across the donor landscape. It argues that by applying a transformative governance lens to the interactions between donors, women, and youth peacebuilders we can better understand the funding conditions necessary to fulfil both inclusive agendas. Without attention to transforming the funding landscape donors will continue to reinforce problematic competition cycles that threaten substantive peace.
