Gender – Development – Security – Peace

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Women, Peace and Security Index 2017/18: Tracking Sustainable Peace through Inclusion, Justice, and Security for Women.
Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security
Peace Research Institute of Oslo
2017 :: 84 pages
Report PDF: https://giwps.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/WPS-Index-Report-2017-18.pdf
Executive Summary
The new global Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Index introduced in this report bridges insights from gender and development indices with those from peace and security indices. The index incorporates three basic dimensions of well- being—inclusion (economic, social, political); justice (formal laws and informal discrimination); and security (at the family, community, and societal levels)—and captures and quantifies them through 11 indicators. It ranks 153 countries—covering more than 98 percent of the world’s population—along these three dimensions in a way that focuses attention on key achievements and major shortcomings. It reflects a shared vision that countries are more peaceful and prosperous when women are accorded full and equal rights and opportunity. A primary goal of the index is to accelerate progress on both the international Women, Peace and Security agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, bringing partners together around an agenda for women’s inclusion, justice, and security. It offers opportunities for stakeholders to review and discuss challenges and to identify opportunities for trans- formative change. It highlights key priorities, points toward a roadmap of needed reforms, and can inform more effective partnerships and collaboration.

Preface
Global indices are a way to assess and compare national progress against international goals, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, by distilling complex information into a single
number. Such composite indices can capture and synthesize an array of data in a way that can be readily understood and that is especially informative for multidimensional concepts.

The new global Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Index introduced in this report bridges insights from gender and development indices with those from peace and security indices. The index incorporates three basic dimensions of wellbeing—inclusion (economic, social, political); justice (formal laws and informal discrimination); and security (at the family, community, and societal levels) – and captures and quantifies them through 11 indicators. It ranks 153 countries [covering more than 98 percent of the world’s population] along these three dimensions in a way that focuses attention on key achievements and major shortcomings. It reflects a shared vision that countries are more peaceful and prosperous when women are accorded full and equal rights and opportunity.

A primary goal of the index is to accelerate progress on both the international Women, Peace and Security agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, bringing partners together around an agenda for women’s inclusion, justice, and security. It offers opportunities for stakeholders to review and discuss challenges and to identify opportunities for transformative change. It highlights key priorities, points toward a roadmap of needed reforms, and can inform more effective partnerships and collaboration.

Alongside much-needed reforms, this report aims to inspire further thought and analysis, as well as better data, to illuminate the constrainers and enablers of progress for women and girls to meet the international community’s goals and commitments. Highly comparative and easy to
understand numbers can call out low performers and help to reinforce good performance.

The WPS Index and the findings it reveals are likely to be especially useful to several key stakeholder groups:
:: Policymakers can draw on the results to set priorities for action to improve women’s inclusion, justice, and/or security in countries that are performing poorly overall or where achievements are unbalanced across the three dimensions and the underlying indicators. The index results reveal the potential for improvements, as well as more generalized deficits that require attention.
:: Civil society can use the results to spotlight achievements as well as injustice and to hold decision-makers accountable, especially given the links to the Sustainable Development Goals to which all national governments have committed.
:: Businesses and investors can better analyze risks and assess the policy environment in countries based on rankings on inclusion, justice, and security.
:: Academics from a range of disciplines—peace and security studies, development economics, gender specialties – can exploit a wealth of possibilities for research from the WPS Index, which provides a major database for analysis as well as online tools to investigate the data.
:: The international development community can see a comprehensive picture of achievements and gaps along a range of fronts, including areas needing greater focus and investment.

The index will be updated every two years. It will track progress ahead of the UN High-level Political Forum in 2019, for follow-up and review of the Sustainable Development Goals, and the 20th anniversary of 2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, providing a platform for scaling up efforts toward 2030.