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Christian Aid publishes new report that investigates the degree to which international organisations implemented feminist principles in their economic responses between 2019 and 2023.
By amplifying the voices of feminist economic justice advocates, the report reveals that the power dynamics that underpin today's global economic architecture do not offer an enabling environment for feminist economic policymaking to flourish and be fully realised.
The primary implication is that advancing feminist macroeconomic policymaking requires global economic architecture transformation that places human rights, gender equality and care at the centre of the economic policymaking of international institutions and democratises global economic decision-making at all levels.
Executive summary
1. Introduction
For over 50 years, an international community of feminist thinkers, researchers and activists have advocated for a different economic system that is centred on equality, care and the fulfilment of human rights. This tireless work spans households, communities, ministries of finance and more, with another key location of this struggle being the international financial architecture: the rules, systems and international institutions and forums that shape economic policymaking everywhere.
The Covid-19 pandemic and its widely visible gendered implications for care, poverty and inequality served as a litmus test for the efficacy of this architecture to ‘build back better’. While the pandemic provided important opportunities for feminist economic justice activists to strengthen care-centred economies and make progress towards a global macroeconomic environment that supports women’s rights and gender equality, the economic crises it triggered also narrowed the menu of policy options available to many economic decision makers.
This report thus examines the economic policymaking of a selection of international and regional institutions and forums in relation to gender equality, care and women’s rights, using the period between 2019 and 2023 as a window into their practices. By establishing what meaningful progress towards applying feminist economic principles might look like for these institutions, and by analysing what and who has shaped current outcomes across them, this research aims to offer reflections to support feminist economic justice advocates in pursuing effective strategies for change in future.
2. Methodology
The research in this report was compiled using a combination of qualitative research methods, combining extensive document reviews with key informant interviews (KIIs) with both institutional insiders and feminist observers of the institutions. Throughout, the research team aimed to be responsive to members of the feminist economic justice community this report aims to support.
Key areas of investigation included:
- The state of play: What narratives, language and concrete practices of feminist economic principles are being used and implemented in these institutions?
- Decision-making and power dynamics: Which key actors and power dynamics influenced if and how feminist principles were integrated in economic decision-making during the pandemic?
- Enabling context: What factors enabled or inhibited successes and failures around feminist economic policymaking?
The institutions and forums covered in this research were selected based on a set of criteria designed to ensure diversity of mandates, influence and international versus regional perspectives. This selection process led to the inclusion of the following 12 institutions: G7, G20, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), African Development Bank (AfDB), UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), UN Women, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee).
3. Conceptual framework
Building on a review of feminist economic principles and literature on decisions and initiatives pursued by the selected institutions and forums that demonstrate a range of views and perspectives, this report sets out a Benchmarking Framework to contextualise ‘progress’ in applying feminist economic principles in the praxis of international organisations and to help locate specific policies, organisational trends and institutions within feminist discourse.
The Benchmarking Framework, illustrated below in Figure 1, offers five classifications on a continuum.
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The far left represents instrumentalisation and co-option, when gendered concepts and language are used to further deepen extractive, patriarchal and neoliberal systems and policies (eg, ‘gender is good for growth’), diluting the meaning and political nature of feminist concepts.
The far right represents the deep systemic and structural transformation that these feminist economic principles unambiguously require, challenging power and fundamentally rethinking the nature of the economy.
In between are three other classifications that describe the various degrees of integration of feminist economic principles – from gender-blind policymaking, to add-women-and-stir approaches that address gender inequality superficially without challenging core macroeconomic approaches, to instances where policymaking is rights-based, care-centred and intersectional, but still falls short of transforming the deeper power dynamics embedded in the global economic system.
Paired with short institutional profiles, the Benchmarking Framework is used throughout this report to contextualise developments that took place within selected institutions and forums, with particular attention paid to the research period 2019 to 2023.
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Throughout their history and during the pandemic, the G7 and G20 have faced several structural hurdles in advancing feminist economic principles, such as the separation between their finance and gender tracks. Their approaches to gender and economic policymaking have invariably oscillated between instrumentalising gender equality as a ‘driver for growth’, remaining completely gender-blind – as in most of their economic responses to the pandemic – and considering some more in-depth treatment on gender, care and decent work issues under a handful of certain presidencies (eg, the 2018 G7 in Canada, the 2022 G7 in Germany, and the 2024 G20 in Brazil). Yet, none of these considerations made it into the core economic decision-making of their finance tracks, classified as the add-women-and-stir approach. Given the lack of implementation structure and accountability to track policy outcomes over time in these informal forums, priorities shift with each presidency, and language that better reflects feminist economic principles in one year often disappears the next.
The G20 made major decisions in responding to the pandemic – on debt relief (the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) and the Common Framework for Debt Treatments) and multilateral development bank (MDB) reform – and steered key decisions in the IMF (Special Drawing Rights allocation for emergency liquidity) and the OECD (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) framework to tackle tax abuse), without considering feminist economic principles. This contributed to a highly inequitable global pandemic response that widened inequalities between the global North and South and fell far below its potential to enable countries to recover from the pandemic and uphold critical care services.
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For most of its existence, the IMF did not consider gender equality to be relevant to economic stability and growth – its mandate – and therefore remained entirely gender-blind. From 2013, it started piloting gender research and surveillance analysis under an instrumentalist framing, culminating in the development of the institution’s first dedicated gender strategy in 2022. The Fund’s body of gender work, including analysis recognising the care economy, has expanded since 2020. Nevertheless, the Fund’s central role in upholding a neocolonial global financial architecture – dominated by the interests of a small handful of global North countries underpinned by a neoliberal economic ideology – has limited its ability to evolve towards more transformative and rights-based approaches in its macroeconomic work. During the research period, this was exemplified by the institution’s sidelining of gender issues throughout its primary pandemic response, as well as the disconnect between the expansion of its analytical gender work versus its continued widespread enforcement of austerity measures during and post-pandemic in the global South. Despite the relatively effective internal institutionalisation of its gender work, this refusal to seriously explore alternative policy options, undertake gender impact assessments of policy conditionality, and commit to a ‘do-no-harm’ standard has contributed to feminist groups and commentators considering the IMF’s gender efforts as either further co-option, or, at best, an add-women-and-stir approach.
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The World Bank has worked on gender issues from the early 2000s and has since been a global champion of the instrumentalist ‘gender as smart economics’ framing, although the massive size and diversity of its operations and structures make the Bank a behemoth in which many dimensions of its economic policy work remain entirely gender-blind. Its dedicated gender unit and gender strategies largely advance add-women-and-stir practices such as ‘gender tagging’ that have done little to impact the Bank’s core economic approach that privileges private over public development financing and has been critiqued by feminist writers as consistently prioritising the interests of Northern capital over women’s human rights. In its policy lending, the World Bank does not evaluate the overall gender impacts of its conditionality, while some of its ‘prior actions’, ie, policy conditions, are specifically gender-targeted. In project lending and more generally, the Bank’s gender focus remains decidedly on micro-level interventions aimed at increased access to finance for women business owners, consistent with its broader financialised, private sector-first approach. During the Bank’s pandemic response, rapid loan disbursements raised safeguarding concerns, particularly because the Bank’s Environmental and Social Framework (ESF) lacks a standalone gender safeguard. With more than half of these disbursements going through the Bank’s private sector arm and many being based on front-loaded projects that were already in the pipeline, women’s rights groups also raised concerns about how well suited the Bank’s responses were to address the gendered impacts of the pandemic. Despite the Bank’s new gender strategy and its 2022 Invest in Childcare initiative reflecting several feminist economic principles on care, power relations and structural conditions, concurrent reforms of the Evolution Roadmap process, the new Corporate Scorecard, and International Development Association (IDA) replenishments confirm that, overall, gender work has been deprioritised across the institution and these initiatives remain add-ons.
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The OECD has a robust research programme on gender which has developed tools on gender mainstreaming, statistics, budgeting, leadership, as well as tax and gender, but it remains siloed from the OECD’s ‘core’ macroeconomic work and structurally under-resourced, pointing to an add-women-and-stir approach. The institution’s overall role in championing economic growth and trade liberalisation while largely representing the interests of the global North, as well as major corporations, means that its overall approach to feminist economic principles remains instrumentalised. The OECD’s BEPS process to tackle international tax abuse – initiated in 2013 and codified in the two-pillar ‘Inclusive Framework’ during the pandemic in 2021 – completely fails to consider gender impacts of tax abuse and feminist perspectives on the global tax architecture. Moreover, the way many global South countries were included in the negotiation process was described as ‘coercive’ and driven by US interests and strong corporate lobbying, deepening rather than transforming the power dynamics embedded in the global financial architecture. UN independent experts criticised the resulting two-pillar framework for undermining the ability of low- and middle-income countries to advance gender equality, support the care economy and fulfil their women’s rights obligations. In part in reaction to the two-pillar outcomes, African governments tabled a UN General Assembly Resolution on a Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation in November 2022, seeking to address tax abuse matters in a more democratic and truly inclusive forum.
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Among the MDBs and particularly compared to the World Bank, the IDB’s significant body of research on the care economy and its mainstreamed operational integration of gender considerations across almost its entire lending portfolio make it stand out as a leader in its field, though it still falls short of a rights-based, care-centred and intersectional approach. Its overall framing on gender equality remains an instrumentalist ‘business case’ and mostly focused on micro-level interventions, mirroring the strategic priorities of the World Bank, eg, on human capital and accessing economic opportunities. During the research period, the IDB’s 2020 review of its Environmental and Social Policy Framework (ESPF) resulted in a standalone gender standard, while its 2022 institutional strategy included a focus area on gender equality and minorities that clearly reflects intersectional analysis. However, the IDB’s claims to have integrated gender in its pandemic response were challenged by independent gender experts, the new gender standard’s implementation hinges on an under-resourced ESPF unit, and concerns were raised that its mid-pandemic Vision 2025 took a highly instrumentalised approach and could risk undermining important gains in its gender work. The arrival of the IDB’s new president Goldfajn in 2022 created new openings for civil society engagement, which may allow for greater transparency, ambition and independent scrutiny of some of the highlighted disconnections.
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The AfDB’s historic gender analysis and first gender policy in 2001 used rights-based frameworks and recognised the importance of macroeconomic policies for attaining gender equality. Yet, the evaluation preceding its 2014–2018 gender strategy indicated that its long-standing gender mainstreaming efforts had ultimately resulted in gender still being treated superficially and as an optional add-on, indicative of an add-women-and-stir approach. While the evaluation recommended internal transformation to address this, the pandemic seems to have narrowed and instrumentalised rather than transformed the AfDB’s gender approach. In its 2021–2025 gender strategy, its women’s economic empowerment work was largely reduced to micro-level interventions such as enhancing access to finance for women business owners and women’s skills building. This shift was particularly exemplified by the AfDB’s Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa (AFAWA) initiative, aimed at ‘unleashing women’s entrepreneurship for growth’ and described as the AfDB’s centrepiece on gender. Many observers consider the AfDB as having moved away from representing African interests and its original decolonial mandate as a whole.
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UNCTAD was founded to better represent the interests of global South countries in the global economic architecture. Despite different phases of leadership, it has retained that ambition, reflected in economic recovery proposals emerging from the pandemic that championed a progressive Global Green New Deal, as well as macroeconomic policies (eg, on debt relief, trade regimes, taxation) promoting structural changes to the global financial architecture, shifting power, and re-orienting towards a publicly led development paradigm. However, most of UNCTAD’s work until recently has been gender-blind, with a gender and trade programme only starting in 2010. Although its gender work has grown in relevance since then, the programme remains small, under-resourced and isolated from UNCTAD’s core work, highlighting that even in an institution premised on more progressive economic ideologies, conservative member states limit the scope and ambition of gender work. The UNCTAD15 conference in 2021 and associated Gender and Development Forum in 2021 attempted to move the scope of the organisation’s gender work from its narrow position into a more comprehensive, feminist agenda – without success. The credible leadership of UNCTAD’s first female Secretary-General Grynspan and efforts to develop a gender strategy could be opportunities to link economic transformation, feminist structural critiques and the care economy, but will likely face similar constraints.
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UN Women, established in 2010, demonstrated strong feminist economic analysis that was rights-based, care-centred and intersectional and challenged macro-level systems head-on in its 2015 landmark report, Progress of the world’s women, and subsequent research reports. However, its wider institutional constraints – such as limited resources and changes in leadership and staff that have pushed the institution towards a more mainstream empowerment agenda and to seek out corporate partnerships – have over time challenged its legitimacy and prevented it from contributing to systemic economic transformation. During the research period, UN Women produced important data on the gender impacts of the pandemic and government responses, and put forward a feminist plan for sustainability and social justice, but largely failed to back more structural macroeconomic policy and global financial architecture reform demands from feminist movements. Its 2022 attempted partnership with BlackRock was widely described as the co-option of the entire institution, and, although terminated under pressure, has further damaged its reputation among women’s movements and feminist economic justice advocates.
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Of all the institutions selected in this research, ECLAC has championed the clearest and most in-depth feminist transformational policy approaches, challenging prevailing development paradigms and mainstreaming gender analysis in a comprehensive way. With roots in heterodox economics from the start, its long-standing work on care and feminist economics more broadly stands out as rights-based, intersectional, and closely aligned with regional movements, including through hosting the Regional Conference on Women since 1977. The 2022 Buenos Aires conference led to an intergovernmental commitment on care widely considered the regional ‘gold standard’, and the institution has advanced many structural reform proposals (eg, on debt and a care-centred, post-GDP economy) historically and particularly in the pandemic years.
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UNECA’s founding vision and political role was decolonial. The institution’s trajectory since demonstrates the tensions between this transformative mandate and representing African interests within the constraints of a neoliberal and increasingly financialised global economic context. Some recent UNECA initiatives, such as supporting the UN Tax Convention process and calling for structural reforms to multilateral governance, re-align UNECA with this mandate and feminist demands for systemic transformation. Yet others, such as its ‘relentless’ support for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), were viewed as a turn towards a more orthodox economic approach. These concerns intensified with a strong push towards private finance and de-risking from 2019, which made the institution’s approach to feminist economic principles somewhat less coherent and relevant. Its development of the Protocol on Women and Youth in Trade for AfCFTA between 2021 and 2024 has been viewed by some through this same lens. Nevertheless, as part of its pandemic response, UNECA encouraged members to integrate gender perspectives in fiscal and economic decision-making, building on the institution’s robust gender mainstreaming efforts. Championing gender-sensitive economic transformation remains core to UNECA’s macroeconomic mandate.
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As the treaty body charged with monitoring the implementation of the foremost international agreement on women’s human rights, the CEDAW Committee’s work has always been the most explicitly rights-based of the institutions and forums selected for this research. The Convention is also explicitly anti-colonial and supports the New International Economic Order (NIEO), and since the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, the Committee has increasingly made macroeconomic policy recommendations to governments (eg, on austerity, trade and tax policies as well as extraterritorial obligations) to fulfil its human rights obligations. A more systematic and consistent integration of this approach has so far been hampered by a lack of feminist economists on the Committee and some pushback from member states, although the pandemic led to a surge in significance of the care economy in the Committee’s work.
5. Key findings
1. Understanding the state of play
While the Benchmarking Framework is a limited tool that can only approximate institutional approaches to feminist economic principles based on specific examples described in the data collected, its application during the research period paints a clear picture and offers a number of valuable insights. It evidences that international institutions and forums are not monoliths in their approach to feminist economic principles. Each approaches gender, care and women’s rights issues in various ways, both through shifts in overall direction throughout their history as well as through differences between internal teams and policy areas, sometimes simultaneously. During the research period, gender-blind macroeconomic policymaking continued to be a significant approach, particularly for those entities that exclusively or overwhelmingly represent the world’s largest economies and have the strongest ‘hard levers’ to influence economic policymakers and shape global economic decision-making. Most institutions used feminist concepts in instrumentalised ways and applied add-women-and-stir approaches, while few integrated feminist economic principles in ways that meaningfully effected ‘core’ macroeconomic policymaking. While the impact of the pandemic on institutional approaches was not uniform, several organisations that already had robust rights-based and care-centred approaches in place were able to elevate this work, while others evolved less and even retrogressed at times, as gender agendas were pushed aside especially in the early economic responses to the pandemic.
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2. Decision-making and power dynamics
This report reveals several important power dynamics behind the institutional approaches to feminist economic principles in the multilateral sphere. Among the institutions and forums themselves, the research repeatedly reaffirmed that there are implicit hierarchies and tensions between organisations over their power to influence economic policymakers and shape global economic decision-making. These hierarchies are particularly shaped by financial firepower and how far their mandates endow them with unique roles vis-à-vis economic policymaking and the global financial architecture. Similar patterns are mirrored within national government, where entities and actors focused on promoting gender equality and women’s rights are often less influential than – and at times in tension with – economic policymakers. Decision-making in international institutions and forums remains largely shaped by their respective member states, often driving or blocking the degree to which organisations apply feminist economic principles. At the individual level, this research finds that leaders or so-called ‘insider champions’ were, at times, significant drivers of the evolution of institutional approaches to gender and economic policy work. The more effective leaders were able to use and alter their institutional structures to anchor progress over the long term, while all leaders faced institutional structures that limited the scope of their work. Finally, this research documents a range of tangible impacts of civil society advocacy in influencing the thinking of officials and supporting the evolution of approaches to feminist principles in the economic policymaking of the entities analysed.
3. Enabling context
This report’s findings demonstrate that a combination of different factors often contributed to the evolution of the entities’ approaches to gender and economic issues. Factors that certainly enable progress towards applying feminist economic principles include an openness to heterodox economic thinking within an institutional culture, having the support of member states, insider champions and civil society to push from within and outside the institutions, and having the institutional resources to realise commitments made. Yet, this research demonstrates that by far the biggest determinants of institutional approaches to applying feminist economic principles are their mandates, financial firepower and governance structures. The benchmarking overview in Figure 2 starkly highlights how these proxies for greater power in global economic decision-making correlate with less transformative approaches. This has significant implications for the post-pandemic global economic context and prospects for feminist recoveries, suggesting that, while some progress may have been made in individual institutions, the broader power dynamics within and between institutions – the international financial architecture – does not offer an enabling environment for feminist economic policymaking to flourish and be fully realised.
In support of the feminist principles outlined in chapter 3, the primary implication of these findings is that advancing feminist macroeconomic policymaking requires global economic architecture reform that places human rights, gender equality and care at the centre of the economic policymaking of international institutions and democratises global economic decision-making at all levels.
4. Strategies for change
Finally, this report reflects on what strategies for change to advance feminist economic policymaking in the multilateral system have proved successful. The varied reflections by key informants demonstrate that how ‘success’ is defined is strongly correlated to how feminist economic justice advocates working inside and outside the institutions understand their role within a broader theory of change and the position of the institutions they are engaging with within the global financial architecture.
Within institutions, ‘insider champions’ deployed a range of tactics that have led to the successful institutionalisation of gender and economic work, including continuously making the case internally for the relevance of gender analysis to economic policymaking to high-level management and colleagues, securing external funding to support developing this area of work – particularly through research, and working collaboratively with external groups such as academics, CSOs and other international organisations.
For those working outside the institutions, a range of strategies are frequently successfully pursued that broadly respond to the different approaches to feminist economic principles taken by the institutions.
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Each of these strategies involve a wide range of tactics that have proven successful in reaching their different objectives, such as building relationships with officials, using media strategies to exert pressure on decision-makers, developing robust feminist economic policy analysis, documenting the impacts of the institutions’ operations on communities and even infiltrating the institutions themselves.
Across each of these experiences, two common threads stand out. Key informants repeatedly raised the importance of pursuing complementary strategies and tactics simultaneously by working collaboratively with the diverse community of feminist economic justice advocates that engage in the multilateral system. Relatedly, given the notion that the current global economic architecture is so unfit for purpose for realising feminist economies, the importance of working both within and between institutions to successfully advance feminist macroeconomic policymaking is apparent. While important progress may be made working to influence one institution as it is, ultimately, the roles and functions these institutions play within the global financial architecture, and the power dynamics behind them, require transformation as well, which requires dedicated resources and strategies.
6. Recommendations
Based on the many insights and lessons drawn from the experiences of key informants, official document reviews and extensive desk-based research, the research team offers three overarching recommendations to support all who are interested in or working towards advancing feminist economic policymaking navigate the international financial architecture.
- Whose feminist principles? Understand and consciously navigate the differences in approaches that institutions take to feminist economic principles, from co-option, instrumentalisation and add-women-and-stir approaches to those that centre women’s rights, care and intersectionality and pursue structural economic transformation. Interrogate where you sit on this spectrum and what you want to achieve.
- Work within and between institutions. Do not approach institutions as if they are monolithic. Understand the underlying drivers and dynamics that shape their decision-making. Do not limit your strategies to pursue progress within one or several institutions or forums. The global financial architecture does not provide an enabling environment to realise feminist economies in its current form. Strategies for change therefore must encompass tactics that aim to shift power between institutions and transform the global economic architecture.
- Grow the feminist economic justice community. The world needs more advocates for feminist economic justice everywhere. Wherever and however you work, champion this community, work inclusively and collaboratively, and open space for others to make a difference in advancing feminist economic policymaking at all levels of decision-making and agenda-setting.
A set of additional, more detailed recommendations for philanthropic donors and practitioners in this field can be found in Chapter 6.
[1] Please note that the tables in this section mark developments that took place during the research period (2019–2023) in bold. Developments outside that period are marked with grey Xs. For detailed benchmarking frameworks for each institution, please refer to chapter 4, Institutional deep dives, and Annex III. The descriptions in this section are summaries that are fully referenced and sourced in the corresponding sections in the main body of this report.
