Gendered Power Structures in Green Foreign and Security Policy: An Intersectional Framework for Integrating Feminist Principles into Security and Environmental Governance

The global rise of Green Foreign and Security Policy (GFSP) frameworks has opened new debates about how environmental challenges, climate risks, resource extraction, and migration are governed at the international level. Yet the integration of gender into these emerging security approaches remains uneven and theoretically underdeveloped. For instance, the EU Climate Security Action Plan (2008–2020) failed to integrate gender-disaggregated data or address the specific vulnerabilities of displaced women, leading to limited impact on food and water security initiatives. The UN Climate Security Mechanisms focus primarily on state-level risk assessments, often overlooking the everyday insecurities of women in fragile and conflict-affected areas. The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism within the European Green Deal is another example, which lacks a gender-sensitive lens in its economic and trade measures, failing to account for how decarbonization policies affect women-dominated labor sectors in the Global South. The Gender Action Plans agreed in earlier COPs, while promising on paper, also have suffered from weak implementation and insufficient funding for women-led climate adaptation initiatives. This study addresses this gap by assessing how gendered power structures, institutional narratives, and policy discourses shape green and security strategies in contemporary foreign policy. By situating gender at the centre of environmental-security governance, the research proposes an intersectional analytical framework for integrating the core principles of Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP-3Rs - Rights, Representations and Resources) and GSFP principles (4Ps-Participation, Protection, Prevention, and Promotion), into the design and evaluation of GFSP agendas. The study is guided by the following research questions: (1) How do gendered power relations shape the design, prioritization, and discursive framing of GFSP within mainstream foreign and security institutions? (2) How are feminist principles operationalized—explicitly or implicitly—in environmental and security policy documents, legislative outputs, and institutional practices? (3) What gaps, contradictions, or synergies exist between gender-equality commitments and environmental/climate-security objectives? (4) How can empirical indicators or evaluation frameworks capture gendered and intersectional outcomes in feminist-green policy integration? (5) What patterns emerge from textual, discursive, or network analyses of policy documents and institutional actors regarding gendered influence in environmental-security governance? The study employs a quantitative multi-method design combining computational text analysis, automated content coding, and statistical modelling. The dataset consists of foreign policy strategies, national security documents, green transition frameworks, parliamentary debates, and international reports. Where available, policy impact indicators (e.g., gender budgeting allocations, environmental spending, representation metrics) are integrated to test correlations between feminist-informed policy content and measurable governance outcomes. By situating gender at the core of environmental and security policymaking, this research extends the workshop’s agenda on gender effects in mainstream policy domains and demonstrates how rigorous empirical approaches can uncover the institutional dynamics that shape representation, power, and justice.