Feminist Foreign Policy Meets Climate Crisis: A Global South Interrogation

Abstract

This study investigates how Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) frameworks engage with climate and environmental cooperation by employing feminist critical discourse analysis of FFP documents from Canada, Germany, and India, complemented by 12 semi-structured interviews with FFP scholars, practitioners, and civil society actors. Although FFP has gained prominence since 2014, its intersection with climate governance remains insufficiently theorised, especially from Global South perspectives. The analysis explores tensions between FFP’s emancipatory rhetoric and its integration within growth-oriented, technocratic frameworks that perpetuate donor-recipient hierarchies and colonial legacies. The study contends that FFP functions as a technology of governance: a framework that incorporates feminist demands into bureaucratic and market logics without enabling the structural transformations these demands necessitate. The findings identify 5 interrelated mechanisms through which this occurs: bureaucratisation, recognition without redistribution, universalisation, green growth, and security depoliticisation. FFP climate initiatives prioritise symbolic inclusion over substantive resource redistribution; intersectional commitments concerning caste, race, and Indigenous epistemologies remain marginalised in practice despite rhetorical acknowledgment; and military spending alongside extractive development models fundamentally contradict feminist climate justice principles. India’s non-adoption of FFP is considered not as an absence but as an analytically significant stance that reveals the Northern epistemic foundations of the project. Comparative analysis indicates that genuinely feminist climate cooperation requires structural shifts toward locally grounded, co-created policies that position marginalised communities as decision-makers rather than beneficiaries. This research advances decolonising climate governance scholarship by emphasising South-South cooperation as an alternative framework and questioning whether state-led FFP can achieve transformative climate action within capitalist structures.