Launch of the Policy Brief on Women’s Human Rights,
Macroeconomic Transformations and Development Justice
For decades, governments and global institutions have claimed that neoliberal economic reforms would lead to growth and development. Instead, they have led to debt, inequality, climate collapse, and corporate power that continue to worsen with no end in sight. Current macroeconomic policies and institutions promote policies that privatise public goods and services, cut social protection, increasing the burden of marginalised women and communities.
This APWLD publication, Policy Brief on Women’s Human Rights, Macroeconomic Transformations and Development Justice, brings forth a feminist analysis of how global economic policies continue to exploit women, communities, and natural resources across Asia and the Pacific. It shows how the current system relies on women’s unpaid and underpaid labour, while cutting funding for the very services that they need. It reveals how the UN’s development agenda, rather than challenging these structures, has often helped legitimise them.
The policy brief also surfaces the impacts of debt, austerity, trade liberalisation, privatisation, digitalisation, and militarisation and demonstrates that these are not isolated policies, but part of a broader system designed to protect monopoly capital and silence resistance. Governments and global institutions have failed to deliver justice. The system isn’t broken – it is working exactly as intended: for profits.
Feminist movements across the region are demanding a different path. Development Justice means cancelling illegitimate debt, ending harmful trade and tax rules, reversing austerity, and investing in public goods and people’s rights. It means putting care, redistribution, and sovereignty at the centre of our economies. This policy brief presents a feminist alternative to the current world order.
Another world is possible, a feminist world is possible!
