(Gendered) resilience in community-based natural resource management in fragile and conflict-affected settings

In so-called ‘fragile and conflict affected settings’ there is an increased focus on strengthening local governance systems for natural resource management as a means of conflict prevention. As exemplified in the World Bank ‘Pathways for Peace’ agenda and the UNEP report on Conflict and Natural Resource Management, this is framed in relation to ‘resilience.’ These reports conceptualise resilience as both a desirable quality that communities should have for conflict-prevention and as a way of describing socio-ecological systems with well-managed natural resources. The paper considers how resilience is gendered and racialised in the assumptions that ‘the local’ is a space that is in need of discipline in relation to natural resources, while ignoring the role of ‘the global’ in natural resource extraction. To demonstrate this, I analyse the framing of ‘good’ natural resource management as facilitating and sustaining ‘resilience’ to conflicts within broad international agendas (such as Pathways for Peace) and how this occurs more specifically in four donor-funded peacebuilding projects directed at community-based natural resource management in Liberia and Sierra Leone.