The feminist nonprofit sector is finally responding to neoliberal pinkwashing
The third sector always had an important role as accountability for corporate and governmental abuse.
Image description: A protestor holds up a sign saying: “Stop corporate land & resource grabs!” while text proclaims: “Feminist advocacy ends UN Women’s Partnership with BlackRock, Inc”.
In May 2022, UN Women announced a partnership with BlackRock Inc, one of the world’s most lucrative investing firms. Their tone was ebullient, thanking BlackRock Inc for their support for “financing women’s and girls’ rights”, and their joint announcement referred to a vague “gender lens for investment”, with no criteria or blueprint mentioned.
For some feminist advocacy organizations and activists, this was perhaps unsurprising - the UN has had historically little transparency and seemingly even fewer criteria for accepting corporate donations. But this was unacceptable. BlackRock Inc. is the largest known holder of debt in the Global South, holds various militarization projects, and consistently invests in development projects that directly cause environmental destruction and irreparable harm to Indigenous communities and rural women.
AWID and WEDO began a joint campaign against the BlackRock partnership with UN Women. They mobilized their networks, getting over 600 feminist organizations to sign a letter that was sent directly to the UN Women leadership. They described the partnership as “corporate capture of the UN” and urged UN Women to immediately rescind its partnership with BlackRock, set standards for future private sector partnerships, and involve feminist civil society in UN Women governance”. This feminist campaign gained considerable momentum, was covered by 19th news, The Guardian, Bloomberg and more, and also shone a light on other corporate partnerships at the UN that are inconsistent with the UN’s mission and values. This campaign and its resulting coverage led to UN Women terminating the partnership.
The campaign against the BlackRock and UN Women partnership was about more than just ‘washing’ rhetoric, whether pink or green, but about exposing the influence of “corporate interests in political spaces (local, national, transnational), in different sectors of our economies, and more broadly, in all areas of our lives.” AWID is continuing this work and has recently launched a call for comics and animations that use comedy and satire to comment on and criticize corporate capture.
The public pressure on BlackRock is growing; last week, Christian and Jewish clergy and monks led a collective direct action protest into BlackRock offices in New York City. BlackRock is the largest financier of climate destruction and they were demanding an end to new fossil fuel funding.
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In the 21st century, feminist movements and activism have won broader validation and visibility. This has consequently meant greater vulnerability for right-wing co-optation and neoliberal commodification. It’s why neo-fascist political groups can have female leaders and talk about how they support women’s leadership, and how luxury companies can print t-shirts stating “Everybody should be a feminist”. And it’s how governments can try to placate movement and activist-led demands on the streets for feminist justice with language like “gender equality” and “gender mainstreaming”. This language is being used to move the conversation away from power and how it operates within oppressive systems and creating the illusion that adding a one-dimensional “gender lens” represents progress and equality.
It’s unsurprising that there are criticisms of gender mainstreaming policies as being insufficient or only partially implemented, and so it should also be unsurprising that right-wing or neoliberal capitalist institutions will also adopt gender mainstreaming language and policies.
Recently, the International Monetary Fund launched their ‘Gender Strategy’. Their goal is to “mainstream gender” into the IMF, saying that gender equality and economic growth go hand in hand.
More than 100 feminist organizations have joined together and started a campaign to draw attention to the IMF’s gender strategy and to criticize it. They write, “We make reference to a recent report showing that 85 percent of the global population will live under some sort of austerity measures by 2023. The IMF has been undermining the key fiscal policy tools that have historically supported the largely unpaid care economy across the developing world, such as social protection and high-quality, well-funded public services. Yes, we are calling out their hypocrisy, given their modus operandi for the last decades. We found a lot of discrepancies, but we will not be silenced!”
“It is impossible for the IMF to conciliate a gender strategy with its 40-year history of an austerity bias that has negatively affected women’s economic and social rights, livelihoods, and well-being,” said Verónica Serafini, feminist activist and economist with Latindadd. “What we are seeing is a pink-washing programme that promotes an ever-expanding encroachment into the policy space and economic sovereignty of developing countries.“
As campaigners and activists, we are increasingly concerned about neoliberalism, extremist right-wing rhetoric, and yes, hypocrisy from our own progressive movements and organizations. Human rights and justice language are being co-opted or torn apart by institutions and groups that have no interest in changing the status quo. Instead, they are working on further entrenching and expanding systems of oppression and domination. There is a risk in progressive movements and organizations of doing the same by using language and approaches that do not explicitly focus on power and intersectionality. And there is power in progressive organizations banding together and collectively putting pressure and visibility on the corporatization and capitalization of the human rights or environmental rights agenda. Wasn’t this the whole purpose of the third sector, to be another branch of accountability for both the public and the private sector?
This Dispatch was originally written for Mobilisation Lab.