Fit for feminism? Examining policy capacity for Canada’s feminist foreign policy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Canada's foreign policy, traditionally deployed as an exercise in retrospection, requires a strategic direction to address shared planetary threats of climate change, public health, and socio-economic crises. For over three years, the government’s pledge to articulate not only a strategic foreign policy but one with an explicitly feminist mandate, has remained unfulfilled. Given the risk of political instrumentalization of feminist labels and the lessons on policy-implementation gap of global gender equality agendas, this article examines Canada’s readiness for a feminist global engagement. Through Wu et al.'s ([2015]. Policy capacity: A conceptual framework for understanding policy competences and capabilities. Policy and Society, 34(3–4), 165–171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polsoc.2015.09.001) conceptual framework of policy capacity, Canada’s feminist foreign policy emerges as lacking critical political and policy pre-requisites. This article outlines the main gaps across systems- and institutional levels and presents Canada's feminist foreign policy project as mired in politically fragmented, operationally uncoordinated, and institutionally underfunded policy capacity pillars that government and non-government actors are called to address.