Advocacy Brief
May 3, 2022Feminist Action Nexus: Concept and Key Demands
A systemic and structural transformation of our global economic systems and governance is therefore required, to bring about a new paradigm grounded in a feminist and decolonial global green new deal.
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Neoliberalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and colonialism are structures and systemic drivers of women’s oppression, reinforcing and strengthening each other to the detriment of equality and justice. Centered on the concentration of power, upholding the private profit imperative and “market-based solutions,” our current global order actively subjugates most of the global population, especially women, girls, and gender-diverse people. Patriarchal, fossil-fuel capitalism fueled by extraction has also directly created the climate crisis, exploiting and abusing both nature and the labor of women, girls and gender-diverse people while continuing to thwart attempts to advance equity and justice in international and national contexts. Concept and Key Demands Widespread revenue losses due to illicit financial flows, debt service, and inequitable trade agreements including unjust investor protection agreements cause governments to resort to indirect, consumption-based taxes that disproportionately impact women and people of lower income. At the same time, decades of neoliberal austerity measures have resulted in skeletal or nonexistent public services and infrastructure. The care work often provided by feminized people subsidizes this failure of the state, without being recognized as a crucial contribution to the global economy according to current understandings.
The vision for a feminist and decolonial global green new deal encapsulates a broad economic justice agenda aimed at creating an equitable, peaceful and healthy planet for all. Acknowledging the interdependence of trade, human, capital and climate flows, this framing resists socially constructed hierarchies of racial, gender, class, caste, age, sexuality, and ability-based inequalities that underpin colonial, neoliberal, capitalist structures. A feminist and decolonial global green new deal seeks to achieve structural transformation of international financial and trade architectures, to simultaneously eradicate poverty and guarantee ecological sustainability. This includes confronting and dismantling the interlinking trade, taxation, debt, and overall macroeconomic systems and structures that undermine domestic resource mobilization and challenge the ability of governments to provide gender-responsive, quality public services that fulfill human rights and to finance climate action, among other national priorities.
As the world continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, war and conflict, and widespread climate and environmental crises—all which have disproportionate impacts on women, girls, and gender-diverse people—a shift to a new paradigm is urgently required. In 2021, a group of feminist civil society activists working to achieve global climate and economic justice came together in an “action nexus,” formed across two Action Coalitions of the Generation Equality Forum. This group is led by four key partners, who also serve as civil society co-leads of the Action Coalitions on economic justice and on climate justice: the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), the Women’s Working Group on Financing for Development (WWG-FFD), FEMNET —The African Women’s Development and Communication Network, and the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA).
Now known as the Feminist Action Nexus for Economic and Climate Justice, this informal coalition is guided by the objectives, principles, and key demands outlined below. On this basis, the co-conveners welcome like-minded civil society organizations and individuals to join us in influencing global policy arenas to advance our collective agenda for feminist economic and climate justice.
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