Consultant: Gender Transformative Climate Change Action in the Pacific

Background

The Pacific region is one of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The communities in this region are exposed to a high range of climate hazards, and many have very low existing adaptive capacity or resources to absorb these impacts. Their vast geographic spread and remoteness of many islands, as well as population concentrations (both density and sparsity) all mean that support to build the resilience of Pacific Island populations remains an area of great need.

Plan International Australia (PIA) has recognised the need for development assistance in the Pacific and has increasing its programmatic focus in this region over recent years. At the same time, Plan International’s (Plan’s) global focus has shifted, bringing girls and young women to the fore of its work with children and young people, in line with Plan’s new global strategy “100 Million Reasons”. This priority group is particularly relevant given the age profile in the Pacific, and the importance of gender as a theme for Pacific Island nations.

The consequent PIA strategy aims to have 90% of its programs to be gender transformative by 2019. While PIA has a long history of climate change programming, with some good gender-focused interventions, none of the climate or resilience projects implemented to date have yet been considered gender transformative by the annual internal Gender Equality Self-Assessments (GESAs). As we move to increase our climate change programming in the Pacific to address the above-mentioned needs, we need to be clear on what we mean by gender transformative climate change action – i.e. to define what this means to Plan.

It’s important to acknowledge that many toolkits and research papers on the intersections of women, gender and climate change in the Pacific already exist. This research piece will aim not to replicate this body of work, but to build off this basis and provide insights to inform what gender transformative climate change programming might look like for Plan in the Pacific and beyond.

Research objectives

The purpose of this research is to define what gender transformative climate action looks like, in order to inform future program design of Plan’s climate resilience projects that aim to be gender transformative, in the Pacific and elsewhere. In particular, the research should help PIA to:

• Understand the impacts of climate change on girls’ and young women’s rights in the Pacific.
• Understand the impact of gender on climate change interventions.
• Understand why some approaches to climate interventions have benefitted girls and women and some have not.

In order the achieve this purpose, the research will:

• Review previous Plan (primarily PIA, but also examples from other Plan offices) research, publications, and programming approaches (4CA, DRR, WASH, gender, etc) as well as other agencies’ previous and current programming in the Pacific, Asia, etc, from a gender inclusive perspective, as well as Plan’s gender policies and theoretical frameworks in order to:
  • Identify lessons learnt on both context and approaches to successful gender-focused programming.
  • Identify which of these were or have the opportunity to be gender transformative and why/not.
  • Identify the criteria for successful replication and program elements for best practice.
  • Provide examples of gender aware/transformative programming in the Pacific and elsewhere, with analysis as to whether these might be replicable/applicable for Plan.
  • Review existing climate-related advocacy by girls and women in the Pacific to understand the needs and priorities of women and girls, and help to identify potential gaps that future programing could target for support.
  • Develop a framework or model for PIA’s gender transformative climate change programming, as well as tools to inform this programming as needed.