Democratic Innovations as Feminist Publics: Principles and Infrastructures in Feminist Foreign Policies

Authors: Rebeca Miriana Bașuț, Emanuela Ignățoiu-Sora, Liliana Popescu-Bîrlan ABSTRACT Democratic innovation are generally a contested term, especially for their lack of precision and clarity (Elstub and Escobar, 2019). Recent feminist critiques, however, highlight that these mechanisms reinforce traditionalist gendered patterns of exclusion and reproduce heteronormative, elite-driven spheres of influence. Democratic innovation scholars identify four “Wittgensteinian ‘family’ of conceptual clusters that include spaces and processes [having certain resemblance]”: mini-publics, participatory budgeting, collaborative governance and referenda and citizens’ initiatives. This paper builds on existing feminist democratic innovation scholarship and situates feminist foreign policy (FFP) within the collaborative governance family. Since the launch of the first feminist foreign policy in Sweden in 2014, FFPs have been shaped in a collaborative manner, as demonstrated especially by the inter-ministerial international FFP conferences held in Germany in 2022, in the Netherlands in 2023, in Mexico in 2024 and most recently in Paris in October 2025. In fact, the Paris conference has been attended by 450 participants from 55 countries, by 27 international organizations and by more than 100 NGOs. In this paper, we consider the Paris conference as a case study to showcase both the collaborative aspect of shaping FFPs understood as democratic innovation, as well as to highlight the increasing role of “feminist resistance as a bulwark for democracy” (Choi and others, 2024). The paper employs a mixed-method research comprising of document analysis and feminist critical policy analysis. Moreover, it contributes to the on-going debates by: a) first, articulating the normative grounds on which FFP can be understood as a feminist democratic innovation tool; and b) arguing that FFP as democratic innovation enables reimagining the institutional and infrastructural conditions through which foreign policy is designed and implemented. While the first contribution is grounded in debates on power redistribution, epistemic justice and intersectionality, the second contribution tackles the participatory processes that include civil society actors (feminist, queer, migrant), shifting the attention to intersectional representation and accountability in decision-making.