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Paper short abstract

This paper rethinks development through feminist foreign policy, showing how state-led agendas privilege technocratic gender priorities while civil society advances decolonial and care-centered visions, exposing persistent epistemic hierarchies that constrain transformative development.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines feminist foreign policy (FFP) as a site where contemporary development priorities, knowledge hierarchies, and claims to expertise are produced and contested. Drawing on a qualitative feminist research design, the study analyzes how development-related issues are prioritized by governmental and non-governmental actors from the Majority and Minority Worlds in international FFP spaces. The analysis is based on systematic coding of discourse from all of the International Ministerial Feminist Foreign Policy Conferences between 2022-2025.

Policy issues are categorized by frequency and actor type to trace which development concerns become legible within institutionalized feminist policy settings. The findings reveal a persistent divide in how development is imagined and operationalized. Government actors tend to emphasize technocratically manageable and politically palatable priorities—such as gender equality frameworks, multilateral cooperation, political participation, and gender-based violence—while civil society actors, particularly from the Majority World, foreground structurally transformative development concerns, including long-term funding for women’s rights organizations, decolonization, and care-centered economic models.

The paper argues that while FFP opens new spaces for feminist engagement in development policy, it often reproduces hierarchical knowledge regimes that privilege state-centric and technocratic forms of feminist expertise. By mapping whose development priorities shape feminist policy discourse, the paper contributes to feminist and decolonial debates on reimagining development as a plural, contested process oriented toward epistemic justice and genuinely transformative collaboration.