Beyond Survival: Feminist Resilience and the Politics of Ecosystem Shift

Across many parts of the world, feminist and civil society organizations are operating under intensifying pressure shaped by persistent structural inequalities and unequal power relations. Shrinking civic space, democratic erosion, funding cuts, political polarization, and organizational exhaustion are no longer isolated developments but increasingly interconnected dimensions of a broader global transformation. Within this shifting landscape, questions of resilience have moved from the margins to the center of organizational and movement debates.

Yet resilience is not a politically neutral concept.

In development and governance discourse, resilience is often framed as the capacity to adapt, absorb shocks, and continue functioning under adverse conditions. While such approaches may offer practical value, they can also obscure deeper structural questions. Organizations and communities are encouraged to become more resilient while the political and economic conditions producing insecurity remain largely intact.

Under conditions of permanent crisis, resilience risks becoming a language of adaptation to unacceptable realities.

For feminist movements and civil society actors, however, resilience has historically meant something more complex and political. It has involved sustaining collective agency, protecting solidarities, preserving transformative imagination, and creating conditions — including collective care — under which movements can continue to act despite pressure, precarity, or exhaustion.

It is within this broader tension that the Feminist Resilience Toolkit, developed within the wider Heinrich Böll Stiftung network, becomes both timely and relevant.¹

This article approaches the toolkit not as an institutional product to be adopted uncritically, but as a contribution to an ongoing debate on how feminist actors navigate conditions of contraction, uncertainty, and systemic transition. Positioned within this dossier on ecosystem shift, the toolkit raises important questions that extend beyond organizational well-being alone: What kinds of resilience are being considered important? What forms of political agency are strengthened — or potentially diluted — through resilience discourse? And how can feminist approaches remain transformative rather than merely adaptive?

At the same time, the toolkit deserves attention because it moves beyond individualized notions of coping and self-management. One of its strongest contributions is its insistence that resilience is relational and collective. Rather than reducing burnout and exhaustion to personal problems, it foregrounds questions of solidarity, collective care, emotional sustainability, organizational culture, and movement continuity.

This is highly relevant in contemporary civil society contexts where increasing insecurity often coincides with intensified expectations of productivity, flexibility, and adaptability. In many organizations, emotional and political exhaustion has become normalized. The toolkit’s emphasis on collective reflection and care therefore, addresses a significant gap within activist and organizational practice.

Importantly, the feminist framing links sustainability to power relations rather than treating exhaustion as merely psychological. Questions of invisibilized labor, unequal care burdens, emotional work, and organizational hierarchies become political questions rather than private matters.

From the perspective of Cambodia and parts of Southeast Asia, these discussions resonate strongly.

The language of resilience is already deeply embedded in development, climate adaptation, and community governance frameworks across the region. Initiatives such as the Women’s Resilience Index developed with ActionAid Cambodia and United Nations Development Programme² illustrate attempts to incorporate women’s lived experiences and gendered vulnerabilities into broader resilience debates. While such approaches remain shaped by institutional development and disaster-governance frameworks, they also indicate the growing prominence of gender-responsive resilience discourse within policy and civil society arenas.

At the same time, explicitly articulated feminist and movement-driven resilience frameworks remain comparatively under-documented in Cambodia, pointing to the importance of further developing and recording locally grounded approaches emerging from feminist organizations and civil society actors themselves.

Recent discussions among Cambodian feminist practitioners increasingly reflect these concerns.

In a public lecture at Future Forum on the future of civil society in Cambodia, Mrs. Eng Chandy addressed this issue directly. She argued that genuine resilience is deeply embedded in organizational sustainability. True resilience goes beyond mere survival; it requires a collective movement capable of creating conditions where organizations can sustain the courage to challenge the very systems that cause burnout and foster dependency on rigid structural funding. Rather than compromising political vision for financial security, feminist organizations must build intentional coalitions capable of transforming the current funding ecosystem. Ultimately, the demand for structural change must be driven by local movements possessing the courage to challenge the status quo.³

True resilience goes beyond mere survival; it requires a collective movement capable of creating conditions where organizations can sustain the courage to challenge the very systems that cause burnout and foster dependency. (Eng Chandy)

At the same time, feminist and movement-oriented networks globally, including Thousand Currents⁴ , increasingly emphasize accompaniment, relational organizing, and long-term movement sustainability rather than narrow notions of institutional endurance. While these frameworks emerge from diverse contexts, they reflect a broader shift toward understanding resilience not simply as adaptation to crisis, but as the collective capacity to sustain transformative struggle over time.

Within Cambodia itself, many feminist and civil society organizations operate under conditions of funding precarity, shrinking political space, and significant emotional burdens carried by activists and staff. Under such conditions, the toolkit’s emphasis on collective care and relational sustainability speaks directly to lived organizational realities.

Yet the Cambodian context also illustrates some of the ambiguities and tensions surrounding resilience discourse.

In community and land rights struggles — both rural and urban — women have often played highly visible roles as organizers and public representatives. Their leadership has been politically significant and transformative. At the same time, women’s visibility has sometimes been strategically encouraged through assumptions that they are less likely to escalate conflict and may receive more restrained treatment from authorities.⁵ In practice, this can produce a dynamic in which women are expected to absorb political pressure, maintain collective cohesion, and embody nonviolent legitimacy for movements operating under conditions of structural insecurity.

This raises important feminist questions about the unequal distribution of political risk, emotional labor, and responsibility within movements.

Feminist resilience cannot mean normalizing the expectation that women continuously carry the burden of endurance for families, communities, organizations, or movements.

Nor should resilience become a euphemism for asking civil society actors to survive indefinitely under increasingly unsustainable conditions.

This is precisely why the toolkit’s relevance lies not in offering ready-made solutions, but in creating space for critical reflection and organizational dialogue. Read carefully, the toolkit invites organizations to reflect not only on continuity, but on the political and organizational cultures required to sustain collective action over time.

From a Cambodian perspective, this also means recognizing that resilience frameworks developed internationally require contextual translation rather than direct transfer. Organizational hierarchies, patronage dynamics, informal labor expectations, and uneven access to protection shape feminist organizing differently across contexts. Some assumptions embedded in international civil society discourse may therefore require reinterpretation when applied locally.

At its strongest, however, the Feminist Resilience Toolkit contributes to a broader conversation about how feminist movements and civil society actors can sustain political agency, organizational continuity, and collective imagination in a period marked by uncertainty and systemic transition.

Within the architecture of this dossier, this contribution serves a particular function. After examining the structural transformations reshaping civil society ecosystems globally — from aid contraction and authoritarian pressures to institutional fragmentation and shifting power relations — this article turns toward the question of how feminist actors and organizations can remain politically alive within these changing conditions.

The challenge is not simply survival.

It is how to preserve collective agency, transformative imagination, and solidarities under conditions increasingly defined by exhaustion, precarity, and uncertainty.

Read through this lens, feminist resilience becomes not a retreat from politics, but part of an ongoing struggle over what kinds of futures civil society actors are still able to imagine and build together.

Feminist resilience becomes part of an ongoing struggle over what kinds of futures civil society actors are still able to imagine and build together.

The full Feminist Resilience Toolkit can be accessed and downloaded here: https://kh.boell.org/en/tags/feminism-gender

I thank our director Heike Löschmann, for the support and review of this article.

Endnotes

1. Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Feminist Resilience Toolkit [full publication details here: https://kh.boell.org/en/tags/feminism-gender
2. United Nations Development Programme and ActionAid Cambodia, “Understanding the Experiences of Cambodian Women Through the Women’s Resilience Index.”
   UNDP Women’s Resilience Index Cambodia
3. Eng Chandy, Public Lecture at Future Forum on the Future of Civil Society in Cambodia.
   Lecture recording
4. Thousand Currents.
   Thousand Currents approach
   Additional video resource:
   Thousand Currents practices worldwide
5. See, for example, Saba Joshi, “Gendered Repertoires of Contention: Women’s Resistance, Authoritarian State Formation, and Land Grabbing in Cambodia,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 24, no. 2 (2022): 198–220; and Anne Hennings, Women in Land Struggles: The Implications of Female Activism and Emotional Resistance for Gender Equity, GLOCON Working Paper No. 9 (Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 2018).