Defining Feminist Foreign Policy: An Analysis of the 2025 Report

The fourth Defining Feminist Foreign Policy Report was released in October 2025. It offers a comprehensive view of achievements and ongoing challenges on the path toward a truly global feminist foreign policy (FFP). The report profiles the 14 countries that have adopted an FFP, situating each country’s approach within the geopolitical realities of the past two years (2023-2025). 

Contrary to prevailing narratives, the report shows that gender equality initiatives and a feminist future remain possible, and are actively being shaped, even amid intensifying global anti-rights backlash. It provides an important reference point for understanding both the breadth of current FFP practice and the political space that still exists to advance feminist approaches within foreign policy.

At the same time, the report highlights areas where further ambition and coherence could strengthen the transformative potential of FFP. While certain priorities, such as Women, Peace and Security (WPS), gender-based violence (GBV), and aspects of the care economy, are increasingly embedded across FFP frameworks, attention to more structural dimensions remains uneven across countries and policy domains. In some cases, feminist objectives coexist with foreign, security, or economic policies that are not yet fully aligned with those principles. Additionally, FFP is mainstreamed into existing practices with little to no new dedicated resources for implementation, as observed in Canada and the French Republic.  Many FFP countries believe they can embed gender equality into their foreign policy and multilateral engagement without the resources to support these efforts, which contradicts one of the core foundations of FFP. Evidence shows that without adequately allocated funding, commitments risk being symbolic rather than transformative.

These tensions do not diminish the progress made to date. Rather, they point to a need for governments to deepen and consolidate their commitments by addressing structural drivers of inequality, strengthening policy coherence, and translating feminist visions more consistently across all areas of external action.

Building on the report’s findings, this analysis examines four areas where alignment between feminist commitments and broader policy choices remains particularly consequential: 

• The continued securitization and militarization of foreign policy
• Insufficient climate action and financing, especially in light of intersecting gender and climate vulnerabilities 
• Emerging threats posed by digitization, artificial intelligence (AI), and new technologies 
• Persistent economic injustices in global financial systems and governance

Militarization at the Center of Foreign Policy

Escalating global conflicts, mass atrocities, and the steady erosion of international norms and institutions have led many governments to be increasingly vocal in their diplomatic statements and multilateral engagement. Yet a review of the report’s findings suggests that these positions are rarely articulated through, or explicitly connected to, feminist foreign policy frameworks, even among countries that have formally adopted FFPs. 

Governments often speak forcefully about violations of international law, humanitarian crises, and threats to global stability. However, these concerns are seldom framed as feminist foreign policy issues or linked to the gendered political economy of conflict and war. When conflict is addressed within FFP implementation, it is usually through established (WPS) commitments, such as women’s participation in peace processes, protection from GBV, and support for peacebuilding initiatives, rather than through explicit engagement with the structural drivers of militarization, securitization, and war economies. There is an opportunity here for governments to more deliberately connect their analyses of conflict and global insecurity to the feminist principles they have committed to advance.

This disconnect is particularly evident in the gap between governments’ stated commitments to resource gender equality and the material realities of security spending. The report documents a growing number of efforts to finance gender equality and advance FFP objectives. However, these initiatives coexist with sustained, and in many cases accelerating, increases in military and defence budgets across almost all FFP-endorsing countries, except Spain. 

Such trends matter symbolically and substantively: military expansion routinely crowds out social investment and is closely associated with widening gender inequalities and heightened insecurity. The gendered impacts of conflict, felt most acutely by women and girls, especially in the Global South, are well established. Yet FFP-endorsing governments continue to scale back social support while enabling and profiting from geopolitical conditions that fuel instability and insecurity. This contradiction underscores the urgent need for deep scrutiny and sustained feminist pushback.

Insufficient Climate Action

A similar pattern emerges in climate action. The report highlights several commitments to gender-sensitive climate action, most notably by Scotland. These include integrating gender considerations into climate diplomacy, supporting women’s representation in international climate negotiations, and advancing gender-responsive approaches to adaptation and resilience. Some governments also reference the importance of gender-sensitive climate finance, particularly for women-led initiatives and communities facing the most acute climate impacts. 

Yet ambition often exceeds implementation. Gender considerations are more visible in climate narratives than in the large-scale financing, mitigation strategies, and energy transitions that shape economic and political power. Feminist principles are more often applied at the margins, rather than used to challenge the structural dynamics that underpin climate vulnerability and inequality.

Governments will need to connect feminist foreign policy commitments to the structural dimensions of climate action more deliberately—particularly financing, loss and damage, and economic transition, thereby reinforcing the case for examining how economic systems and global financial arrangements continue to reproduce gendered inequalities. 

Climate change remains one of the most urgent global crises, with those least responsible suffering the most severe consequences. In countries around the world, women climate rights defenders, particularly indigenous women, remain at risk for their activism.  Colombia, an FFP country, is one of the deadliest places for women environmental defenders. An FFP without a clear roadmap for climate action and protection for those working in environmental rights may advance feminist goals in the present, but it fails to safeguard feminist futures.

Opportunities and Threats of Digitization and AI

Within feminist movements, digitization and AI are viewed as either powerful levers for transforming women’s and girls’ lives or as some of the greatest threats to feminist futures. This tension is mirrored in the report, which shows inconsistent and often fragmented integration of digital policy into FFP frameworks.

We know that billions are being poured into AI integration across economies and governance. In a world where youth unemployment is rampant and women disproportionately occupy informal and insecure labor, AI is being positioned as a cost-cutting tool for businesses. Yet there is a high risk that it will continue to deepen economic precarity for workers. However, FFP countries have not elaborated on the complexities of AI and have primarily focused on digital inclusion and countering technology-facilitated GBV (TFGBV). While critical, TFGBV represents only a fraction of the harms emerging from unregulated AI and digital systems. Additional risks include AI-driven surveillance and warfare in conflict zones, corporate collaboration with governments and law enforcement to monitor and criminalize abortion access, and expanding predictive technologies that target marginalized communities.

When it comes to tech and AI opportunities, the myopic focus of FFP countries fails to grapple with the potential harms that can arise without proper regulation and monitoring. A feminist approach to technology cannot rely on narrow interventions. It requires confronting structural risks, regulating corporate power, and addressing the economic and social destabilization that AI is accelerating. There remains an opportunity for FFP governments to engage more systematically with digital governance, corporate power, and the socio-economic disruptions associated with AI. This will ensure that feminist commitments shape—not merely respond to—the technological futures now being constructed.

Economic (In)Justice

Feminist foreign policy commitments remain heavily framed around Official Development Assistance (ODA) for gender equality. While such funding is an important component of FFP implementation, it has long represented only a small share of overall development finance and is now projected to decline amid tightening aid budgets. As a result, even where governments signal continued support for gender-equality programming through ODA, the scale of these investments is insufficient to match the ambition of feminist policy frameworks or the magnitude of the structural inequalities they seek to address. It is worth noting that FFP countries do tend to outperform their development assistance peers when it comes to gender-sensitive ODA and funding for women’s rights organizations

At the same time, it is unclear whether FFP-endorsing governments are systematically engaging with broader global economic reforms that are central to feminist visions of justice and redistribution. Issues such as debt relief and restructuring, international tax cooperation, corporate accountability, and gender-just investment frameworks receive far less attention within FFP implementation, despite their decisive role in shaping fiscal space, public services, and economic autonomy, particularly in the Global South. It is increasingly clear that many Global North FFP governments are avoiding or actively delaying the kinds of systemic economic reforms that would most meaningfully support feminist futures. 

Achieving a comprehensive, principled FFP requires deeper commitments, greater coherence, and far more political courage than we are currently seeing. Governments will need to move beyond a narrow reliance on aid-based approaches and more deliberately align FFP commitments with efforts to advance global economic justice, addressing the structural drivers of inequality that ODA alone cannot resolve.

Moving Forward towards Transformative Futures

Overall, FFP countries have not yet moved decisively beyond gender mainstreaming and toward a truly transformative agenda. While governments have made meaningful progress in embedding gender considerations within existing policy frameworks, feminist principles are rarely applied to the underlying systems of power that drive militarization, climate injustice, technological exploitation, and economic inequality. 

The strength of Defining Feminist Foreign Policy 2025 lies precisely in making this moment visible. It shows that the foundations of feminist foreign policy are now firmly in place, but realizing its potential will require greater coherence, deeper structural ambition, and sustained political courage to transcend established models and confront the root causes of global inequality.