Feminist Foreign Policies Are Fighting for Their Life

As anti-rights groups launch a global attack on sexual and reproductive health, countries supporting feminist policy are battling to preserve funding.

This piece was originally published by PassBlue, a women-led nonprofit newsroom that covers the U.N. and global women’s rights.

At a recent ministerial conference in Paris on foreign feminist policy, celebration of hard-won gains in the field ran up against a disheartening canon of well-financed threats and efforts against women’s rights and gender policies worldwide.

The state of the movement is detailed painstakingly in a new 240-page report organized by the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative, a space for feminists working across government, civil society and philanthropy to advance feminist foreign policy. The report was released at an event on the sidelines of the fourth ministerial conference, held this year in Paris from Oct. 22 to 23.

The collaborative has been producing a report on feminist foreign policy, or FFP, biennially since 2021; it was preceded by a paper issued in 2020 on the nature of feminist foreign policy and its core components, drawing on the few examples that existed then.

Lyric Thompson, the founder of the collaborative, said in the new report, “With the renouncement of feminist foreign policies in Sweden, Argentina, the Netherlands and Germany, I thought this year’s report might be an obituary for this now decade-old field.”

But despite such setbacks in the range of countries around the world, the authors found some room for determined optimism.

The collaborative advises each annual FFP conference, and defines it as national policy that uses a gender lens in its interactions with other countries and non-state actors, specifically linking peace, gender equality and climate concerns with an overall emphasis on human rights.

The world’s first feminist foreign policy was announced by Sweden’s foreign ministry in 2014. (Sweden has since rejected the agenda.) Recent overall advances in its implementation include high-level meetings on the policy within governments and in regional alliances; mainstreaming a feminist perspective in forums focusing on climate and finance; prioritizing women and gender issues in foreign development funding; and increasing investments in women-run organizations as well as achieving gender parity in ministries of foreign affairs and similar bodies.

In 11 years, the movement has grown from a thought experiment that could barely reference any models to a small but vigorous sample of countries that have made considerable strides toward making feminist foreign policy a reality. It has been popular across all global regions, with Chile, France, Colombia and Liberia just some of the champions. But opposition has grown even faster.

According to the report, “Well-funded anti-rights opposition movements are polarizing politics and sweeping elections around the globe, claiming a number of feminist foreign policy governments in their wake: first Sweden in 2022, then Argentina the following year and most recently the Netherlands and Germany.”

The report’s authors encourage “digging a little deeper beyond the headlines” to note that more FFP countries survived an array of national elections than lost advocates, with Slovenia, Spain, Liberia, France, Mexico and Canada all retaining governments that are at least supportive of the policy.

The report’s writers also take comfort in a steady number of countries showing interest, with Australia, Brazil, Honduras, Nepal and the United Kingdom “among the newcomers who are exploring feminist approaches to foreign policy.”

However, the positive buzz wears thin, given indications that not only is FFP being specifically targeted but also the broader category of official development assistance, or ODA, is also being diminished.

According to the report, ODA (bilateral funding between donor and recipient nations) dropped nine percent in 2024, with an even sharper decline of 9 percent to 17 percent predicted for 2025 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD.

Notably, FFP countries are more likely to give money to development programs across the board. Countries with feminist foreign or development policies are higher contributors on average than the countries represented in the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee, a cluster of some of the world’s largest donors.

A decisive tipping of funding scales is emerging, with anti-rights opposition groups receiving more money: $1.2 billion in the past five years versus $700 million in the past decade, according to research by Neil Datta in The Next Wave report, published earlier this year by the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, a nonprofit network of lawmakers.

“So their pace of support and organization and resourcing is increasing,” Thompson said about opposition groups in the FFPC report, “at the same time that ours is decreasing, both with traditional donors as well as the bilateral and multilateral assistance from government donors.”

When PassBlue asked who is largely behind this funding surge, Thompson was clear. “They were seeded with the evangelical Christian United States organizations, including but not limited to Family Watch International, C-Fam, and others.”

These groups are also some of the forces behind the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family, an effort backed by President Trump in his first term and signed by 39 countries that attacks reproductive, abortion and LGBTQ+ rights by bringing abortion opposition to the United Nations.

According to Thompson, the resources for these broad opposing forces are coming not only from the U.S. but also from parts of Europe and Russia. Religious conservatism, given strong headwinds by some of the world’s most powerful governments, has particularly targeted FFP because of its emphasis on sexual and reproductive health rights.

This year’s Commission on the Status of Women conference, held in March at the U.N., was an example of an umbrella group of women’s-rights advocates falling prey to these machinations, where attendees were forced to settle for a tepid final declaration, amid country pressures, especially from the U.S. Though the gathering caved to pressure to exclude mention of sexual and reproductive health rights in the declaration, the U.S. still denounced it and the entire 2030 Agenda, or Sustainable Development Goals.

In contrast, feminist foreign policy countries are sticking to their values on reproductive rights, even if it means fewer supporters. The conference in Paris ended with a declaration initially signed by 31 governments, a modest number, but it was more than the 20 signatories on a more general document out of the Mexico City conference last year.

The new FFPC report also highlights a cross-regional group of 78 countries (including FFP countries Liberia, Slovenia, Spain, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, France and Germany) that have upheld investment in sexual reproductive health and rights.

“This year’s declaration was very targeted in its language around families and bodily autonomy,” said Spogmay Ahmed, a co-author of the report, “and that was intentionally done so, given the particular focus on those issues in this political climate.”

In the report, the collaborative asserts that such rights are among the most-consequential issues facing feminist foreign policies. Bottom line, as a policy group, they are also feeling the financial heat. “It’s pretty dire,” Thompson said.

“It’s actually a funny split screen, seeing a multi-year sustainable pathway for the work, and on the other hand,” Thompson added, “particularly being a U.S. based organization working on these issues, I have never had the number of donors either cancel commitments, or more recently even ask for money back, because they’re afraid of it being frozen.”

Three of the countries praised in the report as FFP champions will be members in the U.N. Security Council come January, which the collaboration considers a glimmer of hope. France, as a permanent member, will be joined by Colombia and Liberia.

These small strategic windows give some hope to the work of FFP advocates, who say they will continue to seek new ways to keep their work going amid the mounting opposition.