The Global Gender Equality Goal and Tanna Women: Exploring the relevance and usefulness of the gender Sustainable Development Goal (SDG5) within the everyday lives of women from Tanna (Vanuatu)
Abstract
Countering gender inequality and achieving women's full participation in environmental management and development is a significant policy challenge for governments in the Pacific Islands region, as it is in most countries across the world. Many Pacific women have pointed out that they are substantially under-represented in formal leadership roles, subjected to high rates of gender-based violence, and often excluded from employment, education and financial resources. Pacific Island leaders have sought to converge the United Nations (UN) 2015-2030 Sustainable Development Goal for gender equality - SDG5 and its associated Targets - into their national policies to drive affirmative societal change. But progress to achieve SDG5 in its first nine years has been slow and uneven, and scholars have critiqued the framing of SDG5 for being primarily aligned with liberal feminist and Eurocentric ideas.
Most research examining the challenges of implementing SDG5 via policy and practice is desk-based and focussed on top-down governance approaches or the interconnections between SDG5 and the other development goals for specific industries or sectors. There are minimal empirical studies specifically examining the relevance or usefulness of SDG5 from the ground-up - with and within the everyday lives of women who the UN seeks to 'empower' to achieve SDG5. This is a critical knowledge gap and one that this research seeks to address.
In this study I utilise post-structural feminist and interpretive research methodologies to (i) explore the ways that gender equality materialises in the lived experiences of women from Tanna (Vanuatu), and (ii) examine where and how the women's ways are illuminated or cast into shadow by the framing of SDG5. Across three themes relating to the women sustaining their places, doing leadership and practicing reproduction rituals, this study demonstrates that many of the Tanna women's ways of knowing and doing gender equality are illuminated by SDG5. But there are also many of the women's ways cast into shadow by the narrow framing of SDG5, either as a misaligning intersection - for example, the women's roles in reef use and conservation, which SDG14 does not make explicit, and as silences - for example, the women's customary empowerment rituals and knowledge. These 'shadowed' ways represent substantial missed opportunities for realising gender equality via SDG5. Overall, the study's findings suggest that SDG5 would be more relevant and useful in the Tanna women's context if it had a pluralistic framing, one that is conceptually broader and culture enabled.
This study is based on a context-specific data set (with Tanna women in 2017 - 2018), and hence, a diverse program of future research on Tanna, in different locations across the world, and with other gender groups, would be useful to fully examine the extent to which SDG5 is relevant or useful within COVID-19 post-pandemic local contexts. Doing so may also give us important information on how to unlock the full potential of global goals like SDG5 to achieve gender equality, not only in the final six years of the SDGs but also as we begin to design the next post-2030 global goal for gender equality.