This panel examines how Small Island Developing States (SIDS) can protect democratic resilience and exercise meaningful agency in a changing global order, with particular attention to gendered power relations, representation and participation. It asks how democratic governance can remain responsive amid overlapping environmental, economic and geopolitical pressures; how women, girls and gender-diverse people are included in decision-making and leadership; and how small island states negotiate relations with larger powers while safeguarding sovereignty. It also considers how multilateral forums such as AOSIS, the Commonwealth and the United Nations can amplify island voices, and whether global governance structures adequately reflect the priorities, knowledge and lived realities of island societies.
SIDS confront some of the sharpest consequences of an increasingly unstable global system, including climate breakdown, economic vulnerability, debt, geopolitical competition, migration pressures and fragile access to essential public services. These pressures are experienced unevenly, with gender, class, age, disability and location shaping both exposure to insecurity and access to political power. Yet SIDS are not merely sites of vulnerability. Through coalition-building, climate diplomacy, regional cooperation and multilateral engagement, they have often shaped international norms and advanced collective solutions beyond their material power.
The panel proceeds from the premise that democratic resilience and meaningful agency in SIDS cannot be understood or achieved without taking account of gender relations. The unequal distribution of power, resources, care responsibilities, security and political voice shapes whose priorities are recognised, whose knowledge counts and whose leadership is enabled. Resilience and agency, therefore, are not gender-neutral.
We invite papers on gender-responsive climate governance, women’s political leadership in SIDS, care economies and public services, feminist foreign policy, gendered climate mobility, and intersectional approaches to democratic participation.
