Feminist policymaking has become an increasingly prominent yet conceptually contested field within feminist governance scholarship (Sawer et al., 2023). Governments now adopt "feminist" labels for foreign policy and development cooperation, while regional organisations mainstream gender across trade, security, migration, and climate frameworks. Simultaneously, civil society actors contest these state-led initiatives, redefining what constitutes genuine feminist intervention as opposed to purple-washing (Chappell & Mackay, 2021; Belle & Wegner, 2025). Despite this proliferation, systematic, comparative understanding of how feminist ideas travel from principle to practice remains limited — including who carries these ideas, which institutions absorb or resist them, and what is lost or transformed along the way.
This panel treats feminist policymaking as an empirical puzzle and, above all, as an ongoing process of negotiation, institutionalisation, and contestation. It invites contributions addressing how feminist perspectives become embedded in policy agendas; how they are adapted or diluted as they move across national, regional, and interregional contexts; and under what conditions they produce meaningful rather than symbolic change.
The panel's comparative scope is deliberately ambitious, bringing together European and Latin American dimensions — including recent EU–LATAM cooperation frameworks rarely analysed together despite their growing entanglement through diplomacy, development partnerships, and regional integration. This design opens new avenues for comparative and interregional inquiry into the diffusion and contestation of feminist governance, responding to the growing need for intersectional approaches and perspectives from the global majority (Forester & Mazur, 2026; Hankivsky & Hunting, 2026).
Contributions are welcome on the role of governments, regional organisations, international institutions, social movements, and other stakeholders in advancing, redefining, negotiating, or resisting feminist approaches across policy domains including foreign policy and development cooperation, migration, trade, climate governance, peace and security, human rights, and care policies. We particularly welcome work examining resistance, backlash, and unintended consequences alongside cases of successful institutionalisation.
Finally, this panel is designed as a bridge between scholarship and practice, inviting researchers, practitioners, and scholar-activists alike to generate both theoretical insight and lessons relevant to feminist governance in practice.
