The session, “From Extraction to Care: Financing Climate Justice,” brought together advocates and policymakers working across climate justice, energy transition, care, peace and security, and economic measurement. 

At the Civil Society Forum preceding the Fifth Ministerial Conference on Feminist Foreign Policy, I joined a group of policymakers and feminist advocates to discuss a deceptively simple question: what would it mean to move our economies from extraction to care?

The session pointed to a much larger challenge. The climate crisis is not just one more issue for foreign policy to address. It is exposing the profound limitations of the institutions, economic assumptions, and political bargains on which the current international system was built. A foreign policy architecture organized around national competition, economic growth, fossil-fuel dependency, and militarized security cannot simply add climate justice to its list of priorities. It must fundamentally reorient itself.

The question is therefore not only what a feminist foreign policy should look like. It is what the future of foreign policy and global governance must become if it is to confront a crisis that is simultaneously ecological, economic, political, and deeply unequal.

We have been living through rupture for decades

Much has been said in recent years about a “rupture” in international cooperation. But from the perspective of climate politics, rupture is not new.

The United States’ rejection of the Kyoto Protocol more than two decades ago challenged the original vision of international climate cooperation and initiated a long period of political experimentation. Governments, negotiators and movements struggled with a central problem: how could the global community preserve principles of equity, historical responsibility and differentiated obligations while constructing a system in which all major emitters would participate?

The Paris Agreement emerged from that tension. It was not the product of a harmonious global consensus. It was an attempt to rebuild cooperation following repeated political failure.

Its viability rested on promises: that governments would increase their ambition over time, that climate finance would follow, that commitments would be implemented, and that trust between countries could be maintained. Those promises have not been kept.

Emissions continue to rise. Climate finance remains wholly inadequate, difficult to access and too frequently delivered through loans that deepen the debt burdens of countries already confronting devastating climate impacts. Wealthy governments continue to reduce international support while expanding military spending and subsidizing fossil fuels. The United Kingdom’s recent decision to halve its £1.6 billion pledge to the Green Climate Fund, while redirecting development spending toward what it described as growing security threats, offers a stark illustration of how governments are choosing militarized security over the collective security that climate finance is meant to provide.

The resulting crisis is therefore not only a crisis of climate action. It is a crisis of trust and legitimacy. The next generation of global governance must begin from an honest assessment of that failure. Institutions cannot indefinitely rely on voluntary commitments and diplomatic declarations while allowing governments to disregard the bargains that sustain international cooperation.

Global governance must confront fossil-fuel production

One important direction is emerging from political processes outside the traditional confines of the climate negotiations. In April 2026, Colombia and the Netherlands co-hosted, in Santa Marta, Colombia, the first international conference dedicated specifically to transitioning away from fossil fuels. 

As Diana Parra of Colombia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs explained during our discussion, the Santa Marta process helped demonstrate that a just energy transition “no longer belongs to the realm of aspirations; it belongs to the realm of concrete solutions and the political decisions that we must adopt with urgency.”

For decades, international climate governance has focused primarily on emissions without adequately confronting the production systems that generate them. Governments have pledged to reduce carbon pollution while approving new oil and gas projects, financing fossil-fuel infrastructure, and sustaining enormous subsidies for extraction.

A credible international order cannot continue to treat fossil-fuel expansion as separate from climate responsibility.

But neither can the transition be reduced to replacing one technology with another. As Diana argued, it must be “an economic, social, and democratic transition.” A feminist and non-extractive just transition It must address who owns energy systems, who controls natural resources, who receives the benefits of public investment, and whose communities are expected to absorb the costs.

The future of foreign policy must help countries collectively manage the transition away from fossil fuels, not only through emissions targets but also through cooperation on finance, debt, technology, social protection, industrial policy, and quality employment.

It must also recognize that the transition will not be just simply because it is described that way. Justice requires the redistribution of power and resources and the meaningful participation of those historically excluded from decisions about their territories and economies.

We must flow the money away from harm

Climate finance debates usually begin by asking where additional money can be found. Feminist movements ask another question: what are governments already financing?

The answer exposes one of the central contradictions of the current international system.

Governments claim that resources for climate action, public services, gender equality, and peacebuilding are scarce. Yet enormous public resources continue to flow toward fossil-fuel subsidies, military expansion, border regimes and other systems that deepen insecurity and ecological destruction.

Speaking from her perspective as a Lebanese activist, Shirine Jurdi refused the separation of these issues into different policy rooms: women, peace and security in one, climate justice in another, and militarization in a third.

In Lebanon, she explained, the destruction of forests, farmland, water infrastructure, and homes is also the destruction of the systems through which people care for one another and sustain their communities. Women are caring for the injured, calming children, finding water, managing food shortages, and holding families together under conditions of displacement and violence.

Her intervention makes clear that militarization is not peripheral to the climate and environmental crisis. Military operations destroy ecosystems and infrastructure. Armed conflict increases displacement and unpaid care work. Military power protects geopolitical and economic interests, including access to fossil-fuel resources. And military budgets absorb resources that could otherwise finance adaptation, renewable energy, public services, and community resilience.

A climate-just foreign policy must therefore adopt a divest–invest framework. It must ask not only what should be financed, but what governments must stop financing.

That includes ending public support for fossil-fuel expansion, regulating corporate actors, complying with international humanitarian and arms-transfer obligations, and redirecting military expenditure toward the institutions that actually create human security.

As Shirine argued, compliance with existing law can simultaneously be “a climate action,” “a care action,” and “a Women, Peace and Security action.” The fact that our institutions classify these as separate policy domains is itself part of the problem.

What we measure is a political choice

The transformation must also extend to the economic assumptions that shape foreign policy and international cooperation.

Alice Ridge of the International Women’s Development Agency reminded us that gross domestic product not only fails to capture some of the things we value, but its exclusions reflect the values embedded in the current economic system.

Unpaid care work is treated as economically invisible. Environmental destruction may increase measured economic activity. Recovery from wars, oil spills, and disasters can contribute to growth, while the daily work of sustaining families and communities is assigned no value at all.

If care, wellbeing, and resilience matter, they must be visible in the systems that guide public decisions.

This is not a technical debate about indicators. Measures such as GDP define the scope of lending, debt assessments, investment decisions, development strategies, and perceptions of national success. They shape which sectors governments prioritize and whose contributions count.

The Beyond GDP agenda offers an opportunity to redefine progress around wellbeing, equity, inclusion, sustainability, resilience, human rights, and respect for the planet. But this work must go further than adding new indicators to an unchanged economic model.

Foreign policy must challenge the pursuit of market-led growth as the overriding purpose of development. It must support the expansion of sectors necessary for human and planetary wellbeing while accepting that activities based on extraction, exploitation, and ecological destruction must contract.

It must also invest in individual-level and intersectional data. Household averages can conceal how climate impacts are experienced differently by women, adolescent girls, older people, people with disabilities, and others whose access to resources and decision-making power is constrained.

The way we measure the world determines which realities become politically visible, and therefore possible.

Accountability cannot end with climate pledges

Finally, the future of global governance must construct stronger systems of accountability.

The UN climate regime creates important norms, reporting frameworks, and financial mechanisms. Movements have fought for decades to establish and strengthen these institutions, and we should not abandon them. But the UN climate negotiations have not created sufficient consequences for governments that repeatedly fail to deliver.

Climate obligations must therefore be enforced through a broader ecosystem of international law, human rights mechanisms, domestic courts, financial regulation, and political accountability.

This changes the question from whether a government has submitted a climate pledge to whether its actions are consistent with its broader duties to prevent harm, protect human rights, regulate corporations, and cooperate internationally.

The CEDAW Committee’s 2023 concluding observations on Norway offer one concrete example. The Committee called on Norway to review its climate and energy policies, including the extraction and export of oil and gas and the activities of state-owned and private companies, in light of their disproportionate impacts on women and girls both within and beyond Norway’s borders. The intervention matters because it treats fossil-fuel policy not as separate from a state’s human rights obligations, but as one of the arenas in which those obligations must be tested. 

A government cannot credibly describe itself as a climate leader while expanding fossil-fuel production. It cannot claim feminist credentials while its energy, trade, military, or financial policies produce disproportionate harm for women and marginalized communities within and beyond its borders. It cannot champion peace while financing weapons and systems of extraction that generate instability.

The climate crisis did not emerge because we cared too much for one another. It emerged from systems that treated people and the planet as resources to be extracted, exploited, and discarded.

Moving from extraction to care is therefore not about adding compassion to the existing international order. It means reorganizing power, resources, and institutions around the conditions that sustain life.

The future of global governance is not about managing climate breakdown more efficiently or preserving an unequal system through new language and incremental reforms. It must build forms of cooperation capable of phasing out fossil fuels, redirecting resources away from harm, valuing care and wellbeing, and holding power accountable.

The institutions and actions that emerge from this moment will be judged not by the sophistication of their declarations, but by whether they can deliver safety, dignity, and justice in a rapidly changing world.