After the Swedish government election in 2022 the newly elected right-wing government initiated a reform of Swedish development aid. The government also decided to retract Sweden’s previously declared Feminist Foreign Policy. This study uses poststructural feminist and postdevelopment theories to identify what gender equality policies that become (im)possible in the government’s aid reform to strengthen the coupling between the two foreign policy areas of development aid and foreign trade. Adopting Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to Be approach to discourse analysis, the study finds that the reform concentrates development aid towards economic growth and trade, representing poverty alleviation as a project of export and trade promotion and as a tool to enhance Swedish interests. Interviews with professionals at Swedish state agencies have been conducted to identify the ways in which state agencies negotiate how the problems of development and gender inequality are represented in the reform. The results show that state agencies have constructed spaces that maintain their power to alter practices in alignment with their expertise. The reform shifts attention away from gender equality to women’s and girls’ empowerment and constructs the goals of the two foreign policy areas as mutually beneficial. While gender equality policy has not disappeared, it has been altered, modified and narrowed to align to the interests of the corporate as well as to the goals of export promotion, trade liberalisation and economic growth.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-230992 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Blaad, Hannah Mari |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för ekonomisk historia och internationella relationer |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
Page generated in 0.0018 seconds