Feminist Development Policies: What does “Feminist” mean for Women in the Global South?

The rationale behind many of these policies is a concern for basic justice and also basic economics. In other words, women are seen as vehicles to make families and countries more prosperous. On the other hand, interrogating development models has been a perennial concern of Global South feminists. While these have been part of wider debates on social justice, many of these feminist development policies leave current development paradigms intact.

This roundtable aimed to facilitate a lively discussion on what a feminist development policy should be and how it should be framed to respond to the global project of gender justice, more specifically

• What does a feminist development policy entail?
• How does it respond to broader concerns of gender justice rather than to a simple instrumental approach in which women continue to be seen as “good for development”?
• How can feminist foreign policy truly transform current development models?
   

PROGRAMME

Welcome Remarks
Natalia Figge
Gender Justice, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Berlin

Special Intervention:
“Understanding the context of Feminist Development Cooperation”
Bärbel Kofler
Parliamentary State Secretary to the Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, Germany (online)

Roundtable panelists
María Jesús Conde Zabala
Ambassador-at-Large for the Feminist Foreign Policy, Spain

Sofia Calltorp
Ambassador for Gender Equality and Coordinator of Feminist Foreign Policy, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Sweden

Gita Sen
Coordinator, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN)

Paul Ladd
Director, UNRISD

Moderator
Naila Kabeer
Professor of Gender and Development, London School of Economics

This hybrid event was part of the 30th Annual Conference of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE), Transforming Global Governance for Social Justice:Feminist Economics and the Fight for Human Rights, held from 29 June to 1 July, 2022, in Geneva, Switzerland.