Feminist and Green Foreign Policy: Building a Stronger Alternative

Oct 14, 2026 | Natalia Jimenez Galindo and Maryruth Belsey Priebe
Environmental Peacebuilding Association

In January 2025, Argentina’s president used his address at the World Economic Forum in Davos to attack feminism and environmentalism as parts of the same ideological agenda, one that used demands for equality and environmental protection to justify expanding state power. A year later, the Trump administration turned such opposition into foreign policy. A White House memorandum directed US agencies to withdraw from dozens of international bodies, including UN Women and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, in the name of American sovereignty. These moves reflect a broader shift towards nationalist and masculinist foreign policy, in which strength means dominance and the ability to impose one’s interests on others, and international commitments become bargaining instruments. This is happening just as climate change, insecurity and growing inequality demand responses that no government can deliver alone. Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) and Green Foreign Policy (GFP) offer two alternatives to this direction. Both challenges security defined through military and economic dominance, and both seek to address the unequal relationships and structural conditions that produce insecurity. Yet their influence is increasingly contested, with earlier commitments to their agendas reversed or deprioritised in several countries. Feminist and green movements have also often developed their foreign-policy agendas separately, despite their shared histories and overlapping values. Building on a workshop of the Green Foreign Policy Fellows at the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Thessaloniki office, this post examines where the two approaches differ, where they reinforce or strain against one another, and what each can learn from the other. We argue that feminist and green principles combine easily when they can be folded into categories institutions already recognise, such as gender mainstreaming, participation indicators and development programming. They stall when integration would require redistributing power over resource extraction, military budgets, the growth model, or who makes decisions. A stronger feminist-green alternative will depend on pressing on these harder questions. Different Priorities, Different Approaches Despite their shared history and overlapping values, feminist and green foreign policy have developed in different political contexts and reached different stages of institutionalisation. Since Sweden introduced it in 2014, FFP has become an identifiable government policy in several countries, supported by national strategies, ministerial guidelines and implementation mechanisms. GFP has evolved mainly within Green parties and transnational environmental movements. Although its roots are older, it remains less developed as a coherent foreign-policy approach. The Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Green Foreign Policy Snapshots was motivated partly by the absence of a commonly accepted definition. Their priorities also differ in emphasis. Feminist foreign policy centres gendered inequalities and relations of power: whose rights are protected, who participates in decisions, and how resources are distributed. Green foreign policy emphasises ecological sustainability, environmental interdependence and responsibilities towards future generations. These are not mutually exclusive commitments. Feminist approaches have long engaged with environmental justice, and Green parties have often adopted feminist principles. But each brings into focus concerns the other can overlook. Where governments have tried to combine the two agendas, integration has taken different shapes. Canada folded climate concerns into its 2017 Feminist International Assistance Policy, so integration happens largely through aid and development programming. Germany placed feminist foreign-policy guidelines alongside a dedicated Climate Foreign Policy Strategy in 2023, giving the agendas parallel institutional standing. Chile went further, tying its Feminist Foreign Policy Action Plan to its Framework Law on Climate Change and explicitly to questions of territory and extraction. All three reflect genuine commitment, but in each, integration has proved easiest where it fits existing institutional categories and hardest where it touches the distribution of power. Three tensions illustrate this. First is Time horizons. Feminist approaches often foreground immediate material needs such as access to food, housing, healthcare and security cannot wait for long-term objectives to be met. Green foreign policy attends to ecological limits that extend across generations, with climate diplomacy working to 2030 and 2050 targets. This is especially visible in climate finance, where an agreement may promise substantial support over decades, while communities facing drought need immediate accessible funding. Feminist analysis highlights the unequal costs of waiting, including the unpaid work that falls on households when essential services are missing. Green analysis insists that immediate responses must remain ecologically sustainable. Connecting the two could make long-term commitments more credible by securing the immediate conditions needed to reach them. The tension extends to different understanding of growth and extraction. Feminist foreign policy emphasises access to resources and reducing material inequality. Green approaches also question whether growth and rising consumption can continue within ecological limits, from Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics to degrowth proposals for planned reductions in wealthy economies. Neither is an agreed GFP position. Feminist scholars such as Cohn and Duncanson's feminist analysis of Green New Deals have also challenged the assumptions behind green economic policies. Chile shows how quickly this debate becomes practical. Its Framework Law on Climate Change offers one of the strongest legal links between feminist and environmental commitments, explicitly connecting climate action to Indigenous and territorial rights. Yet it sits alongside an economy still heavily dependent on extraction, and its environmental-justice provisions are weakly enforced. Chile has recognised these rights in law far more readily than it has changed who controls extraction. Lastly, both approaches have confronted difficult choices over security and force. Opposition to militarism shaped the origins of many Green parties, yet Green positions have evolved. Germany’s Greens were divided over Kosovo in 1999 and later supported military aid to Ukraine. Feminist foreign policy has faced similar tensions. Many feminist scholars challenge militarised security, but FFP does not necessarily rule out force for self-defence or civilian protection. Katharine Wright and Annika Bergman Rosamond found that feminist commitments faded from Sweden’s feminist security narratives during its NATO bid, even before the government formally abandoned FFP in October 2022. Germany’s 2023 Climate Foreign Policy Strategy broadens security to include climate risk, yet it is the Zeitenwende’s turn to military spending that has reshaped German priorities since 2022. In both cases, broadened conceptions of security were among the first casualties when military threats sharpened. These differences should not be understood as fixed divisions between two competing approaches. Neither feminism nor green politics holds a single position on growth, military force or the balance between present needs and future responsibilities. But there are some noteworthy patterns: Feminist and green commitments survive where they can be added to existing frameworks, and falter where they would require shifting control over resources, budgets or decisions. We conclude that this is where closer cooperation between the two traditions is most needed, and most difficult. From Comparison to Cooperation: Building Stronger Alternatives The differences between feminist and green foreign policy offer opportunities for mutual learning. Both have developed important approaches to international cooperation, but they have also struggled to translate their ambitions into consistent political practice. Bringing them into closer conversation could strengthen their ability to influence foreign-policy decisions, particularly at a time when international cooperation and commitments to gender and environmental justice face growing opposition. Green foreign policy could benefit from feminist approaches to power and participation. Feminist research examines how decisions are made, whose knowledge counts as legitimate, and whether those affected have meaningful influence over outcomes. For green foreign policy, this means asking who sets the priorities of international climate finance, and whether communities in recipient countries can shape how funding is used. This gap is visible in Green parties’ own documents.  The HBS Snapshots found explicit references to participatory decision-making in only 15% of sampled Green-party foreign-policy texts, despite participatory democracy being a core Green principle. As the intersectional toolkit for Green Foreign Policy argues, commitments to inclusion must be matched by changes in how resources and decision-making authority are distributed. Language matters here too, presenting communities as beneficiaries of assistance can obscure their political agency and their right to set development priorities. Feminist foreign policy, in turn, could learn from how environmental cooperation has been institutionalised. Over decades, climate diplomacy has built agreements, recurring negotiations and monitoring mechanisms. Under the Paris Agreement, countries submit updated climate plans every five years and report on implementation. These arrangements are imperfect, as withdrawals and inadequate action show, but they offer experience in sustaining commitments beyond any one government. FFP already rests on international frameworks such as Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Linking national FFP strategies more firmly to these obligations, through clear implementation responsibilities, sustained funding and public accountability, could make them harder to reverse. Research on Sweden’s reversal demonstrates the importance of international obligations and established diplomatic practice preserved parts of its gender-equality policy even after the government dropped the feminist label. A third direction from our workshop concerns care as a principle connecting social and ecological responsibilities. Feminist approaches have long examined the often unpaid work that sustains everyday life, while green approaches foreground the environmental conditions on which that life depends. Krystalli and Schulz’s research on care after conflict shows how everyday practices of care are also political, shaping how people rebuild their lives after violence. Bringing these perspectives together could encourage foreign policies that protect the conditions for secure lives, from essential services to healthy environments, while connecting immediate needs with long-term ecological sustainability. Yet recognising care as a political priority does not automatically make policies more equitable. Environmental programmes may still depend on women’s unpaid labour or exclude affected communities from decision-making. A genuinely care-centred approach must therefore not only recognise the importance of care, but also address how its responsibilities, resources and decision-making power are distributed. Building on these lessons requires stronger alliances between feminist and green movements. A shared history and common opposition to right-wing nationalism are a starting point, but lasting alliances need more than shared opposition. Lasting alliances would need coordinated political demands and sustained relationships between Green parties, feminist organisations and civil society across the Global Minority and Global Majority. Climate-finance negotiations are an obvious starting point, since environmental goals there are inseparable from questions of equality, historical responsibility and control over funding. We still know far less about when such cooperation actually changes government decisions than about the values the two traditions share. The Thessaloniki workshop made clear that shared values alone will not produce shared policy. Feminist and green principles are readily absorbed where they fit existing institutional categories, and resisted where they would redistribute power. One simple test can help movements and policymakers tell the difference. Does a policy widen who participates in defining the problem? Does it broaden whose protection is prioritised? Does it address the causes of insecurity rather than only its symptoms? And does it build protections durable enough to survive a change of government? Policies that pass all four tests are doing more than adding feminist or green language to business as usual. At a time when international commitments are under attack, the credibility of a feminist-green alternative will depend on whether it can turn these principles into decisions that redistribute power and make international cooperation accountable to those it affects.