Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock unveiled a blueprint for “feminist foreign policy” this week, promising to allocate more development funding to support women’s rights, gender equality and increase female participation in foreign policy.
Speaking to reporters after the Cabinet meeting, Baerbock said her ministry has completed the work on the guidelines for Germany’s feminist foreign policy. “Feminist foreign policy runs through all areas of our foreign policy actions from humanitarian aid to stabilization measures, peace missions and also foreign culture and education policy,” Baerbock added.
“The feminist foreign policy will pursue a pragmatic approach. Our aim is to tackle the concrete problems of ordinary people,” she said. “Women make up half the world’s population, challenges and problems faced by them must be taken into account. This is about real people, real problems.”
“We want to make societies fairer. And you can’t do without half of the potential, namely women, but they have to be taken into account,” Development Minister Svenja Schulze said.
Steps to take
Germany will lobby to ensure women’s concerns are more in focus worldwide, that women are better represented and that the country’s generous development funds are allocated more to projects that tackle gender inequality. The guidelines for a feminist development policy in Germany stipulate that in the future, more than 90% of newly committed project funds should flow into global projects that also advance gender equality.
Baerbock stressed that the government’s new foreign policy guidelines also include reaching more gender parity at the German foreign office, where currently only 26% of ambassadors are female. “We will work hard to give our foreign service a more female face and to raise the proportion of women in senior roles,” she said.
Gender will also be taken more into account in foreign policy spending, according to the foreign ministry. Germany will lobby to hike the participation of women in formal peace processes, given this was shown to increase the chances of a lasting peace, according to the policy guidelines.
Critiques
The German nongovernmental organization Welthungerhilfe, which supports aid projects across Africa, Latin America and Asia, lauded the development ministry’s initiative but criticized that it was not clear how the feminist guidelines would be implemented concretely and how they would be financed.
“The question of funding remains a blank. Local civil society organizations must be adequately financed and must be able to access funds easily,” the group said in a statement. “How this is to be done remains an open question.”
What is feminist foreign policy?
Several countries have implemented feminist foreign policies, a concept which in theory means protecting human rights and promoting meaningful participation in decision-making by women and other, often marginalized groups.
Feminist foreign policy movement, which was pioneered by a leftist Swedish government in 2014. Such a policy has been embraced in recent years by other countries like Canada, France, Mexico and Spain – although Sweden abandoned it last year after a shift to a right-wing government.
Sources: AA, AP, Reuters, DW