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Feminist International Assistance Policy

The Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP), officially launched in 2017, is a Canadian government policy created to promote gender equality and empower women and girls. Its goals are to eliminate poverty and build a more peaceful, prosperous, and inclusive world.

Image of Chrystia Freeland with Justin Trudeau in Lima, Peru

Background

Prior to the adoption of the FIAP, Canada’s international aid efforts were usually guided by various thematic priorities, including health, education, and economic development. Canada has long had specific international commitments to advancing women’s equality around the world, including being a signatory to the 1979 Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the 1995 Beijing Declaration.

During the 2015 federal election, the Liberals under Justin Trudeau incorporated feminism as a key part of their platform. This occurred following the Government of Sweden’s 2014 announcement that it would be advancing a feminist approach to foreign policy, in part as a response to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and particularly to Goal 5, which aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Following the election of the Trudeau government, they announced a similar approach, namely including gender equality as a fundamental principle of their approach to international aid, and more specifically FIAP. Since then, other countries have adopted a feminist approach to international aid, including Mexico, Luxembourg, Spain, and France.

After extensive consultations with people from around the world, Canada’s FIAP was announced in June 2017 by Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, and Minister of International Development and La Francophonie, Marie-Claude Bibeau. Although Canada has been involved in advocating for gender equality since 1970, the announcement of FIAP marked Canada’s first explicitly feminist foreign policy strategy.

Content

To achieve its goals, the FIAP takes an “explicitly feminist” approach to international development that focuses on advancing gender equality, understanding from the outset that women and girls are often differently affected by global issues like climate change, poverty, and violence.

To achieve their goals of eliminating poverty and building a more peaceful, prosperous, and inclusive world, the federal government’s FIAP report outlines five core action areas:

  • Human dignity – focused on ensuring equal access to health, nutrition and education
  • Growth that works for everyone – focused on promoting sustainable agriculture and technology
  • Environment and climate change – targeting areas like water management
  • Inclusive governance – aimed at promoting human rights and the rule of law
  • Peace and security – addressing inclusive peace process and gender-based violence

More specifically, the FIAP commits Canada to engaging in aid projects and development assistance that targets gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. This includes committing “15 percent of its bilateral international development assistance, across all action areas, to implementing initiatives dedicated to advancing gender equality and improving women and girls’ quality of life.” The initial announcement and report also earmarked funds for a range of projects including money specifically to support local organizations and movements in the area of human rights, investing money into addressing sexual and reproductive health, among others.   

Critique

Since its introduction in 2017, the  FIAP has been widely critiqued for a too-broad approach that does not include clear milestones or sufficient funding to meet its ambitions, among other concerns. Some of these critiques can be broken into three broad categories: financial, feminist, and political.

Financial critiques. The FIAP has been criticized for being overly vague in terms of commitments and reporting, as well as not providing sufficient funds to do the work it promises. For example, the FIAP does not account for how the recipient countries use Canadian funding which makes it hard to know if the funding is being used for its intended purpose. Though the policy is not very specific, the system by which the funding is provided may also be influenced by donor priorities which may restricts the capacity of the recipient countries to create the most effective context-specific program.

Feminist critiques. Critics have also questioned how meaningful the “feminist approach” of the FIAP actually is. When it comes to defining what feminism and empowerment mean, the FIAP is once again vague, and never provides a direct definition of feminism for its policy. A significant issue with the term “empowerment” is that it portrays women as not already possessing power, feeding into depictions of women from the Global South as victims who need to be saved by politicians and donors from the Global North, and given power on their terms. Furthermore, although the FIAP does mention how men and boys can contribute, there is no mention or consideration of individuals who fall outside of the gender binary. While there is mention of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community in the FIAP, it is very brief, and insofar as transgender and non-binary people are often the most marginalized around the world, the FIAP fails to consider how the construction of gender is part of the broader problem of inequality.

Political critiques. Another criticism of the FIAP is that its feminist approach was used for political gain by Trudeau’s Liberal government, and is a “hollow exercise in nationalist branding” and an easy “win” for the Trudeau government, rather than working to make any meaningful change. When the Trudeau government’s FIAP is compared to similar women’s rights policies proposed by his predecessor Stephen Harper, the outcomes and funding for these policies are very similar. The biggest differences between these policies are the language and framing used by these politicians to appeal to their respective political bases. Ultimately, some feel this policy was developed to make the Liberal party seem more feminist, and to allow the federal government to project an image of its government, and with it, Canada, as engaged in improving the lives of women and girls around the world.

Ultimately, despite its failures, the FIAP represents ideas about feminism becoming formally recognized in international aid policy in Canada. The intent, or at least the idea, is a good one. Yet, Canada’s Feminist Foreign Assistance Policy also draws attention to the ways that politicians and policy makers may have multiple and complex motives in invoking feminism in policy making. Some measures of the FIAP have been and are making change in people’s lives, but also, it is unclear how committed the Trudeau (and other) governments are to making meaningful change in terms of disrupting historic inequality and considering the concerns of feminist critics of the policy. While the FIAP represents a first in Canadian foreign policy, its shortcomings spark important conversations about gender, feminism, and Canada’s actions on the world stage.

Additional resources:

Contributors: Lily Collier, Alyssa Innes, Aliza Khan, Katrina Stefaniuk, Radiyah Tasneem, and Sarah Tewari