Political Economy Analysis in Supporting Women’s Electoral Candidacy: Lessons from Nauru

Abstract

With elections expected in Samoa and Tonga in 2021, and Papua New Guinea in 2022, development partners will have already turned their attention to women’s inclusion in those electoral processes as a means by which to reach international democratic standards. Political economy analysis (PEA) — an evidence-based assessment of the political dynamics between structures, institutions and actors in a given context, used to inform policy and programming (DFAT 2016) — has become a fundamental part of program design and implementation, but remains underutilised in the particular area of women’s electoral programming. In their 2016 review of women’s candidate training, Barbara and Baker pointed to the importance of individual women candidates conducting their own localised political economy analyses, preferably at the micro or ‘electorate level’ (p. 2). This In Brief presents a related, but separate form of gender-sensitive PEA, undertaken by a development program to inform the design of a candidate training workshop prior to the general election held in August 2019 in Nauru. Three key lessons for gender-sensitive PEA are presented.