Aiming High, Reaching Low Four Fundamentals for Gender-Responsive State-building

Current external state-building strategies encounter severe difficulties in implementing policy commitments to gender-responsive engagement with fragile states. Because certain areas for intervention are stereotyped as gender-relevant at the expense of others, gender considerations are too often sidelined to subordinate parallel tracks and thus isolated from priority areas for intervention. Cognisant of the many challenges involved in state-building, this policy brief identifies and discusses four building-blocks for the implementation of a gender-responsive approach to state-building in fragile contexts.