Feminist Foreign Policy and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights: A Critical Analysis of Canada's Engagement in Zambia

Abstract

Despite the commitments to local ownership enshrined in the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, donors often prioritize funding global health issues that resonate with their domestic, political, and foreign policy agendas, which do not always align with the priorities of domestic actors in recipient countries. Recent calls for the decolonization of global health have highlighted the unequal power relations and patterns of coloniality inherent in aid relationships. In Canada, research has shown how, domestic, economic, and foreign policy interests influence global health policy. However, there has been less research examining the extent to which Canada's approaches support locally owned, contextually appropriate programming for sexual and reproductive health and rights in recipient countries, in the context of its Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) and critiques of coloniality in international development. Using Zambia as a case study, and qualitative, field-based methods, this thesis addresses this gap by examining Canada's support for sexual and reproductive health and rights and the extent to which it addresses structural barriers. It makes three arguments: 1) Canada's aid approach in Zambia only tangentially addresses the underlying structural drivers of sexual and reproductive health risk, such as poverty, violence and under resourcing in health facilities; 2) legal and policy ambiguities create space for norm spoiling and the delegitimization of sexual and reproductive health and rights; and 3) Canada's failure to implement an antiracist approach in the FIAP shatters its self-portrait as a feminist state, and reveals its moral and policy inconsistencies. The thesis contributes to conceptualizing an anticolonial feminist foreign policy, bridging analyses of power, feminist foreign policy and colonial patterns in international development. It argues that anticolonial feminist foreign policy is explicitly antiracist; pays attention to the interpretations, actors and spaces in which intersectionality is applied; and adopts a sexual and reproductive justice lens. As such, the thesis makes an important contribution to critical development scholarship on the role of feminist foreign policy in protecting sexual and reproductive health and rights; advancing antiracist praxis; and creating space for context-specific approaches to ownership and decolonization in development.