Gendered Rights in the Post-2015 Development and Disasters Agendas

Abstract

This article explores how, 20 years after the Beijing conference, women's rights are being discussed within processes to develop a post-2015 sustainable development agenda and the parallel international disaster risk reduction framework. It is based on analysis of documents produced to date from the various processes, and also personal experience of seeking to influence both the post-2015 development and disaster agendas. It highlights how attempts to marry the environmental and development agendas reveal a continued problematic conceptualisation of sexual and reproductive rights. It suggests that in gender terms, while the post-2015 development agenda and the related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are over-ambitious to the point of being mere rhetoric, gender rhetoric is yet to enter the international disaster risk reduction discourse. This, the article argues, coupled with the continued conceptualisation of disasters as outside mainstream development, has further negative implications for the recognition and fulfilment of women's rights.