National Action Plans on SCR 1325: Developing a Research Agenda

National Action Plans (NAPs) have become a central mechanism of implementation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda over the past decade. Sixty countries as well as numerous regional and international organisations have adopted 1325 Action Plans as of 2016. While new WPS Resolutions have been adopted at an increasing rate in the Security Council, it is through the rising number of action plans that WPS policy is interpreted, remade and put into effect. Global advocates for SCR 1325 call for more and better NAPs. Some organisations even make NAP advocacy and advice a central offering in their WPS portfolio. National women’s organisations spend a considerable amount of their time contributing to NAP processes: preparing civil society inputs for policy prioritisation, ‘shadow reporting’ on progress and advocating new features for ‘2nd generation NAPs’ (such as indicators and monitoring mechanisms) . Given the central role that 1325 National Action Plans have in the development, localisation and realisation of the global WPS agenda and the near unanimous support that they get in both UN and global civil society advocacy, there are surprisingly few academic studies devoting in-depth exploration to the topic. This paper will contribute to the emerging literature that aims to fill this gap. The paper will review existing critical academic studies of National Action Plans, and using two case studies of NAP processes in Finland and Nepal (including their intertwining through donor and civil society relationships), will present an account of how the NAP system has functioned in these two instances and what it means for gender justice concerns in the case study countries. The paper will also reflect on priorities for further critical analysis of National Action Plans.