ABSTRACT
The persistent and chronic under-resourcing of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda remains one of the key challenges to its implementation. Civil society actors working in this space bear the brunt of this. Uncertainty around funding has led to the emergence of new and creative ways of resourcing work on the WPS agenda, and has also generated a significant volume of volunteer labour, which is ‘invisibilised’ and undervalued in conventional accounting of WPS resources. Perhaps deriving from the significance of civil society labour to the formation and development of the agenda, there is arguably a habitualised expectation that volunteer labour will and should sustain WPS activities, which is highly gendered. Funding for WPS work is rarely adequate, and almost never includes predictable and sustained core funding for the organisations that do the bulk of WPS programme delivery in many countries. For civil society organisations the unfunded investment in constantly mobilising resources is the unpaid care work that allows them to achieve their vision and mandates.
