Description
This paper examines the compounding and mutually reinforcing crises facing contemporary societies, including climate change, public health emergencies, mental health, systemic inequality, and political instability. We argue that feminist leadership, grounded in values of inclusivity, intersectionality, and care, offers untapped potential for navigating these overlapping challenges.
Despite the prominence that the concept of “polycrisis” has gained recently as a way to describe the escalating complexity and convergence of global challenges, leadership models capable of addressing this complexity have remained underdeveloped. These models are often rooted in hierarchical or technocratic paradigms. Our paper explores the possibilities of innovative and interdisciplinary interventions, positioning feminist leadership as a transformative model for systems thinking and inclusive decision-making under conditions of uncertainty.
The approach is timely in that global events (e.g. COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, genocide in Gaza, new and protracted conflicts around the world) have highlighted the many limitations of conventional leadership. This leaves, we argue, space for the incorporation of feminist approaches, whose transformative potential have been proven by recent moves to include feminism in global policymaking (e.g. the development of Feminist Foreign Policy).
