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Helping Rural Women Secure Their Land and Resource Rights: Reach, benefit, empower, or transform?
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This essay deals with helping rural women secure their land and resource rights and is based on International Fund for Agriculture Development's work and interventions. 
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From Pledges to Progress: Tracking climate finance flows and accountability in Nigeria and Uganda
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Oxfam’s Climate Finance Shadow reports have shown that high-income countries have failed to deliver on their commitment to mobilize climate finance for low- and middle-income countries. In 2024, two country reports, on Uganda and Nigeria, were published that analyzed how the insufficient international climate finance that is reaching their governments is being spent at national and subnational level. The two reports also lay out ways for how civil society can track these flows, ensure meaningful community participation, and hold their governments accountable.
This paper analyses the findings and commonalities from the reports on Uganda and Nigeria, and includes recommendations for climate finance providers, national and subnational governments, and civil society on how climate finance can be spent fair, transparent, accountable and in an inclusive manner.
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The role of feminist transformative leadership for democratic improvement: learnings from Mexico’s political parity
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In 2019, Mexico achieved a significant political consensus: a constitutional reform established gender-political parity at the executive, legislative, and judicial powers at federal, state, and municipal levels. By October 2024, Mexico had its first woman president. In this context, we aim to examine whether, and in what ways, democracy is transformed when feminist women hold public office. The central question is how a feminist transformative leadership can improve democracy. Building on democratic critical theory, we conceptualise democratic improvement as the exercise of democratic practices and their instalment in public institutions. First, we define democratic practices as: (1) the strengthening of political pluralism, (2) the increase in women’s civic engagement that emerged since the 2019 constitutional reform, and (3) the diversity of women’s leadership in positions of power. In this article, we trace the development of Mexico’s democratic systems that took place in tandem with women’s assertion of their political rights. Second, drawing on Aúna’s accompaniment model, we propose theoretical archetypes of women leaders in Mexico and contrast these with characteristics of feminist transformative leadership. Third, acknowledging that democratic improvement is not solely tied to feminist transformative leadership, we discuss how political parties might hinder women’s full participation in political life. Finally, as part of the conclusion, we warn against placing women leaders on ‘glass cliffs’, expecting them to be saviours of democracy; we discuss the dangers of unnuanced examinations of the performance of women leaders.
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How To Increase Taxes On Fossil Fuel Profits
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Taxing excess profits, both in the fossil fuel industry and the overall corporate sector, is essential to restructure the economy to tackle climate breakdown, reduce inequality and make rich polluters pay. This briefing paper sets out Oxfam’s proposal for two taxes: a Rich Polluter Profit Tax (RPPT) on fossil fuel corporations, and an Excess Profit Tax (EPT) across all other sectors. An RPPT will ensure renewables are always more profitable than fossil fuel investments, and an EPT will reduce market concentration and the concentration of wealth, reducing inequality. Both can be implemented through existing corporate tax systems. Together, they could raise over US $1 trillion in their first year which could fund vital investments for people and the planet. The paper explains how governments can design, administer and coordinate these taxes nationally and globally, to fund a just, gender responsive climate transition and fairer public finance.
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Organised dispossession and development as disaster: analysing caste and gender in disaster policymaking
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Disasters are often constructed as unique and extraordinary events. Such accounts ignore the social histories and inequalities that render specific communities/regions prone to disaster. In this paper, we focus on how coloniality and caste function together to produce dispossession among Dalits, Bahujans, and Adivasis (DBAs) through continuous violence and illegal appropriation of land and resources from ‘lower’-caste people, particularly DBA women, thereby forcing them into further disaster vulnerability. In line with decolonial and intersectional studies of disaster, we posit that greater attention should be paid to historical injustices and ongoing development-induced dispossession of marginalised communities that ultimately create and reproduce vulnerabilities for women/communities belonging to oppressed castes. We analyse disaster management reports by multilateral institutions (such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) and anti-caste organisations. Using a ‘problematisation approach’, we ask what is the ‘problem’ of disaster risk represented to be, what is ‘left out’ of the ‘problem’ statement, and what are the policy silences – aspects that the policy does not include in its problematisations? Our analysis illustrates how extant disaster policymaking reproduces gendered caste-coloniality through the nature–social binaries and technical and dehistoricised characterisation of disasters, which often operate through the development-induced displacement of marginalised communities. At the administration and policy implementation levels, there is a policy vacuum regarding the communication and co-ordination between agencies on disaster and human rights and donor/development agencies. Further, there is a lack of an intersectional approach – specifically to bringing caste and gender into disaster policymaking – in both national- and international-level governance structures. Without problematising processes which recognise organised or systematic dispossession of ‘lower’-caste communities, building resilient communities remains a utopian and unattainable ideal. We argue that addressing the historical disaster vulnerability of caste-marginalised communities requires abatement of land dispossession, development of innovative legal arbitration tools, and integration of intersectionality at multiple levels.
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Beyond drinking water supply infrastructure: gendered lived experiences in coastal Bangladesh
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Women and water have extensively been written about, especially in the context of disaster. Given increasing water scarcity and frequent disruptions to water infrastructure, a large number of water purification technologies have been developed in numerous water-scarce regions by both national and international stakeholders. Despite technology development and demonstrated benefits, there are certain challenges to water access such as lack of nuanced policies, corruption within local institutions, gender and social inequality, and perceived high costs of water. The coastal region of Bangladesh illustrates these issues, with frequent disasters such as floods, cyclone and storm surges, and increasing salinity leading to an acute drinking water crisis. After the arsenic crisis and two of the most devastating cyclones in the history of the country, Sidr in 2007 and Aila in 2009, this region has received huge attention and continual investments in the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector. However, whether or not these interventions could deliver what they were meant for is a different question, a question charged in the space of gender, power, politics, and laws. Through a lived experience approach, perception of lack of decision-making, negative long-term impacts to community well-being, anxiety and distress, corruption in water access, and tension between the socioeconomic power differentials were identified among the primary water users – women. In addition to establishing lived experience as an effective approach in gender–water–infrastructure studies, the study has implications for policy, and practice of development interventions, specifically, the emphasis of gender and power as an important component of designing such interventions to avoid abrupt infrastructure failures.
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Resources: Disaster and Resilience: intersectional approaches towards establishing resilient communities during crises
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This section includes the resource recommendations for the special issue on Disaster and Resilience: intersectional approaches towards establishing resilient communities during crises. 
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Personal to Powerful: Holding the line for gender justice in the face of growing anti-rights movements
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Thirty years on from the commitments enshrined in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA) this briefing reveals a picture of broken promises and unfulfilled ambition by States. This failure is not just due to a lack of political will, but also an economic system that is unequal by design. As world leaders prepare to review their commitments to the BPfA, they must reject the mainstreaming of anti-rights actors and their co-optation of human rights language as this risks violating universal human rights and eroding the hard-won gains of feminist and LGBTQIA+ activists and movements, ultimately breaking the social contract between the state and people.
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Land, Peace and Security: Secure access to land as a vital guarantee for the protection of communities in the Sahel
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The lack of secure access to land is a major driver of physical and food insecurity, violence, and violations of the fundamental rights of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and their host communities. This briefing paper outlines the causes and consequences of restricted land access and explores its links with protection risks in the context of violent conflict and climate change in the Sahel. It highlights the essential role of secure land access and land rights in economic empowerment and protection policies for IDPs and host communities in the Central Sahel, in line with the “Triple Nexus” approach connecting humanitarian action, development and peace.
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Exploring the Tripartite Challenge of Political Participation for Ethiopian Muslim Women
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Since the reform in 2018, Ethiopia has recorded impressive achievements regarding gender inclusivity in politics. However, the under-representation of Ethiopian women in politics continues to endure. Several challenges discourage women’s political participation in Ethiopia, and for Ethiopian Muslim women, the challenges are multi-faceted. This paper explores the challenges facing Ethiopian Muslim women in their political participation. In doing so, the article mainly employs qualitative data, drawing on historical and contemporary works of literature alongside semi-structured key informant interviews. The findings demonstrate a significant challenge for Ethiopian Muslim women in politics. As Ethiopian women, the social structure, customs, and social pressure present enormous challenges. As Muslims, the historical legacy of Ethiopian politics, the exclusionary political narratives, and some self-exclusionary narratives within the Muslim community themselves are additional challenges. Finally, there are challenges specific to Ethiopian Muslim Women, such as theological debates on women’s political participation and the public sphere’s reluctant, if not hostile, reception of an assertive Muslim woman, starting from the denial of schooling that inhibits them from making it to the political arena.
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