Anti-gender & anti-climate politics: exploring converging agendas in Global Majority countries

Politics today is marked by accelerating global backlash against both gender equality and action on the climate crisis. This new working paper exposes how these two agendas are increasingly converging in Global Majority countries.

In recent years, the world has witnessed an accelerating trend of far-right and authoritarian politics emerging across diverse country contexts. This politics is often defined by an increasing turn to anti-gender and anti-climate positions to consolidate power and mobilise voters.

These authoritarian forces have tended to instrumentalise oppositional rhetoric to gender equality and climate action to undermine these agendas, rolling back progressive policies at home and blocking progress in the international arena. While some research has explored how this regression manifests in Western contexts, very little is known about how these regressive agendas converge in Global Majority countries.

This ODI Global working paper is based on a deep dive into the political motivations, conditions and outcomes that shape this heightened opposition at both the national and multilateral level. The evidence explores ways in which anti-gender, anti-climate and authoritarian politics combine in eight countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Türkiye, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, surfacing three main categories of political opposition to progressive gender and climate policies.

Key messages

• Countries marked by authoritarian politics have increasingly turned to anti-gender and anti-climate policies. How these issues converge in government positions can be categorised in three main ways: Explicit Resistors, Pragmatic Resistors or Selective Resistors.
• There are three enabling conditions that underpin this convergence between anti-gender and anti-climate politics, namely: civic space restrictions, economic and/or political ideology, and transnational political networks.
• Feminist and climate movements need support to counter these authoritarian trends and address the intersection of these issues. Data and evidence will be crucial for crafting progressive narratives that align with public values and resonate with mainstream perceptions at the national and local level.