Five Conferences In, Here’s What the Research Shows on the International Feminist Foreign Policy Conferences

Earlier this month, over 700 ministers, UN officials, and feminist activists gathered in Madrid for the 5th Ministerial Conference on Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP). By the official account, it was a success: high-profile speakers, packed plenaries, a political declaration. However, a more critical read grounded in years of research on exactly these gatherings tells a more familiar story about who controls the room, who gets squeezed out of it, and what that means for a framework that claims to be different from the foreign policy that came before.

This blog draws on preliminary findings from a multi-year qualitative study of the FFP ministerial conferences by one of our co-founders, Katie Whipkey, to map which foreign policy issues get raised in these spaces, by whom, and how.

The Conference Series 

The FFP ministerial conferences, held annually since 2022, bring governments and civil society together to advance feminist approaches to foreign policy. And the conferences have grown fast. Germany drew a couple hundred senior officials from 13 countries in 2022. The Netherlands convened 750 participants from 40+ in 2023. Mexico followed with a more intergovernmental iteration drawing around 300 participants from 39 governments in 2024, France convened over 450 people from 55 states in 2025, and now Spain brought more than 700 government officials, civil society organisations, academics and activists. 

Spaces such as these are real and consequential in ways that more conventional diplomatic gatherings are not. They are some of the only venues where feminist movements and foreign ministries sit in the same room with a shared mandate to talk about foreign policy together. That is huge. But we see that what gets said in that room – and by whom – is shaped less by shared feminist values than by who designed the agenda and how much space they actually carved out for non-governmental voices.

The Question of Inclusion

The Madrid conference had a Civil Society Forum: a dedicated day organized entirely by civil society organizations, promoted on the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. It sounds like meaningful inclusion, but in practice, government representatives were largely absent.

This pattern runs through the research. Conference design is the primary determinant of whether civil society can shape the conversation, not only to be invited to listen and legitimize these efforts. When the Netherlands gave civil society real structural access by letting organizations propose sessions, recruiting Majority World activists as official Conference Ambassadors, the resulting agenda was far wider and more substantive than any other conference. Issues governments typically prefer to avoid (e.g., decolonization, debt, unpaid labor, arms control) surfaced because civil society had genuine space to raise them. Mexico, framed explicitly as an intergovernmental and high-level conference with civil society allocated only a single panel, produced the opposite. Feminist networks responded by organizing parallel livestreamed programming on the topics the official agenda had cut: feminist fiscal justice, sexual and reproductive health, non-punitive approaches to justice and mechanisms for participation.

The implication is uncomfortable for a framework built on the idea of co-creation: civil society inclusion as a label and civil society inclusion as practice are not the same thing.

Where Governments and Civil Society Diverge

My research shows that governments and civil society differ in how they talk about foreign policy. Governments consistently anchored their discourse in what the research calls institutionally “safe” issues: gender equality as an abstract commitment, multilateralism, political representation, gender-based violence. These are real concerns. They invite policy responses that are visible and measurable within the liberal framework, but they stop short of shifting hierarchies, redistributing power and resources, and challenging structures of oppression beyond gender.

Civil society actors pushed consistently harder on redistributive concerns: direct funding to women’s rights organizations, decolonization, care economies, trade, and debt. These are the very real concerns where foreign policy touches the lives of the people feminist movements represent.

Strikingly, there was no issue that was discussed at a high frequency (meaning, in the top quartile of all issues mentioned) for both governmental and non-governmental actors at any conference. The overlap only emerged at the moderate tier (the middle 50 percent of all issues raised). This shows us that consensus exists, but only around middle-ground issues that fit within existing systems.

Perhaps more interesting is how the same issue is discussed by each type of actor. On development aid, for instance, governments cited the percentage of their budget directed to gender equality as proof of leadership; civil society described the same funding system as politically distorted and structurally inaccessible with reporting requirements so onerous that small women’s organizations spend half a one-year grant filling out forms before any work begins. On gender-based violence, governments cited protocols and action plans; civil society grounded the conversation in survivor experience and demands for redistributed resources. That gap between the language of compliance and the language of transformation is where the limits of FFP become visible.

The Majority/Minority World Divide

One of the more counterintuitive findings from the research is that the majority/minority world divide in these spaces is less stark at the top of the agenda than expected. Both regions converge on the high-level vocabulary of FFP: gender equality, development aid, multilateralism. This suggests that elite liberal ideas about what FFP means circulate across the Majority/Minority World divide more readily than grassroots feminist demands do.

Where the divide really opens, though, is in the second tier of priorities, or the issues governments and civil society both engage with at moderate frequency but frame entirely differently. Here, Minority World actors concentrate on institutional architecture (Women, Peace, and Security resolutions, funding mechanisms, diplomatic frameworks); Majority World actors raise more disruptive issues rooted in material conditions such as trade, humanitarian response, and historical legacies of colonialism.

Why Does This Matter?

It would be easy to dismiss these conferences as expensive diplomatic theater. The research argues that would be wrong, but neither are they transformative on their own. They are consequential in a specific way: they are one of the few transnational spaces where feminist movements and foreign ministries share a mandate to talk together. Also, declarations create paper trails. They document shared vocabularies, even partial ones, that can be leveraged. Critically, the civil society networks that form across these gatherings outlast any individual conference.

But I keep circling back to a question the FFP ecosystem itself hasn't fully answered: what are these conferences actually for? Are they meant to bring more governments into the FFP tent? To share lessons? To generate high-level political visibility for feminist issues on the UN agenda? To create a genuine strategic planning space where governments and civil society can coordinate positions and set the policy agenda? To be a site of critical pressure on the FFP architecture itself? Or simply for posturing? 

Each of these is a legitimate purpose and perhaps it is all (or none) of them. Each purpose requires different designs, participants, measures of success, and sometimes different politics, though. Running all of them simultaneously, implicitly, produces conferences that feel important without being legible.

Until the FFP ecosystem answers that question with some clarity, conference design will remain a proxy battle for deeper disagreements about what feminist foreign policy is trying to do. The gap between rhetoric and material change – widest on the issues that matter most such as war, economic policy, humanitarian aid, reproductive rights – will not close on its own. And the promise of FFP as a genuinely co-produced, structurally transformative foreign policy framework will remain mostly that: a promise.

Katie Whipkey

Co-Founder and Co-Director of Research and Advocacy