Feminist Reflections on the 2025 IMF–World Bank Annual Meetings: Recalibrating the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

By Maria Syed (she/her), an economics consultant at Third World Network (TWN)

The IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) meetings this month revealed an institution in transition, one attempting to reconcile its historic fiscal orthodoxy with the evolving realities of a fractured global economy. As debt distress, climate shocks, and geopolitical unrest mount across developing and middle-income countries, the Fund’s frameworks for fiscal surveillance and conditionality are being tested against their own limits.
While the IMF’s rhetoric increasingly acknowledges inclusivity, sustainability, and resilience, its instruments often remain anchored in the logic of austerity, reliance on market confidence, and creditor assurance. What follows are reflections on the Fund’s ongoing fiscal policy review, its approach to conditionalities, and the broader implications for global governance.
The New-Fiscal Orthodoxy with the old narrative
The core argument is that enhancing spending efficiency and accountability can generate fiscal space, citing potential long-term output gains of up to 7.5 percent for emerging economies. Yet beneath this modernization lies familiar orthodoxy. As one observer noted during the session, “the Fund’s approach domesticates structural issues, it turns global debt injustice into a problem of domestic inefficiency.”
By focusing narrowly on regulatory reform and procurement liberalization, the IMF risks ignoring the deeper realities of the debt-austerity trap, financial liberalization, and the absence of monetary sovereignty that constrain policy autonomy in much of the Global South.
Conditionalities and the Politics of “Adjustment”
The upcoming Rock Review of conditionalities (2026) will mark a pivotal moment in redefining how IMF programs shape development outcomes. Current evidence suggests that fiscal consolidation continues to dominate program design, with 95 percent of Article IV reports recommending austerity measures, often through cuts to universal social protection or wage bill ceilings. As civil society representatives argued, “when 40 percent of public revenues go to debt servicing, fiscal space is a myth.”
Empirical evidence has long shown that cutting public wages, removal of untargeted subsidies leading to increased inflation in the Global South countries, reduction in budget cuts for education and health sectors as part of social security programs, under Fund programs worsens inequality and unemployment, the very conditions the IMF now claims to mitigate. Yet the Fund’s surveillance framework still lacks mandatory impact distributional assessments. A key recommendation from CSO networks calls for the IMF to measure the impact of its policies across income, gender, and geography, linking these outcomes to the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index to better capture the human consequences of fiscal advice, with climate vulnerability to be a pertinent addendum for impact evaluations conducted.
Most importantly, the feminization of austerity deepens women’s unpaid care work and poverty burdens on women, highlighting the feminist critique of optimism bias in IMF economic projections in terms of overestimation of growth revenuThe growth forecasts are devoid of the cuts in public expenditure that is shrinking health, education and social services, forcing women to fill gaps through unpaid care and reinforcing gendered economic marginalization. The fiscal adjustment cost had been taking a toll on women’s time, labor, and health, as emphasized in one of the reports published by the Bretton Woods project on social and gender inequalities in IMF surveillance.
Debt, Capital Flows, and Structural Constraints
Debt and financial flows were a recurring theme at the meeting. Participants noted that while FDI inflows can stabilize current accounts and support growth, the volatility of portfolio flows, coupled with rising debt-service costs, can amplify macroeconomic vulnerability. As one delegate put it, “the IMF cannot speak of stability while countries borrow to repay debt rather than to build development.” The Fund’s debt sustainability frameworks, designed to reassure creditors, often fail to acknowledge this structural dependency. The call for a shift from debt discipline to debt justice, one that recognizes the human and climate dimensions of fiscal stability, is gaining momentum.
Missing Gender Component and Climate Integration: From Rhetoric to Reality
The 2025 IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings laid bare a deep fault line in global economic governance: even as debt, climate, and inequality crises converge, gender, menstrual health, and care economies remain excluded from the core financial agenda. The IMF’s latest review of conditionalities had been devoid of the gendered, let alone climate impact assessments. The important discussion that came out of how efficient and well-allocated public spending can boost economic growth highlighted the neoliberal narratives of ‘pro-growth spending’ and ‘allocative spending’ to increase the productive capacities of the countries. This view inhibits the true understanding of how the austerity-debt trap has been marring the fiscal space of the debt-distressed and climate-vulnerable countries by focusing on revenue mobilization and expenditure cuts that affect marginalised individuals and communities, especially women in lower-income households, contributing to their unpaid and paid care work. Despite the Fund’s evolving approach to gender, which was incorporated under the “macro-criticality” factor, the IMF’s core policy direction had remained rather consistent and had continued shrinking the public sector of the low-income and transitioning economies. However, the report failed to emphasize the importance of investment in physical and social infrastructure, which is urgently required for the transformative care system.

Since the adoption of its 2021 Climate Strategy, the IMF has expanded its toolkit to include the Resilience and Sustainability Trust (RSF) and new climate diagnostic tools. Staff analysis shows that one-third of IMF surveillance reports now reference climate risks as macro-critical. Yet, the way climate has been treated as an external shock which had to be incorporated in the calculation methodology for its ‘real term’ impacts to be realised, for ‘appropriate measures’ to be taken. While the Fund’s language has evolved from “awareness to action,” implementation remains piecemeal. The “climate informal network” of 23 countries has drafted a shared agenda, but questions linger over whether risk-based fiscal policies and climate-related insurance instruments will reach the scale required. As CSO warned, “green rhetoric without fiscal capacity becomes green austerity.”
The climate integration demands more than macroeconomic modeling; it requires fiscal policies that protect adaptation budgets, support just transitions, and respect common but differentiated responsibilities principles still largely absent from IMF frameworks.
Revisiting Governance and Representation
The debate over IMF governance remains unresolved. Quota reform — a process requiring 85 percent member approval — continues to stall amid resistance from advanced economies. Emerging economies and African nations emphasized that their representation remains disproportionately small relative to global economic weight.
Discussions on recalibrating quota formulas, protecting smaller board members’ shares, and expanding voice for the Global South will determine the Fund’s legitimacy in the decade ahead. The question, as one African delegate framed it, is blunt: “How can an institution advise on inclusive growth when its own governance is exclusive?”
Fragility, Humanitarian Crises, and Early Engagement
The IEO also underscored the need for the IMF to adapt its approach to fragile and conflict-affected states. Humanitarian debt swaps, flexible credit facilities, and anticipatory fiscal mechanisms were proposed as tools for rapid response. Case studies such as Lebanon revealed the danger of fiscal consolidation amid political fragility, while concerns were raised about how the Fund’s engagement or silence shapes perceptions of legitimacy and national ownership.
The challenge for the IMF is to coordinate with humanitarian actors and integrate social protection more assertively into surveillance. It is aptly noted by one of the CSO participants that, “The Fund’s relevance in crises will depend on its ability to act before fragility turns to failure.”
From Technical Reform to Moral Renewal
The reflections from the IEO meetings underscore a deeper struggle within the IMF between recognition and reluctance. Recognition that social, climate, and distributive justice must define fiscal responsibility; reluctance to abandon the comfort of orthodoxy. From a feminist perspective, this omission is not accidental but structural, reflecting institutions still driven by creditor priorities and growth orthodoxy rather than social justice.. As feminist movements have long argued, debt justice, climate justice, and gender justice are inseparable; economies cannot be truly stable or sustainable if they rest on the invisible labour of women and the underfunding of care. The challenge now is not only to reform IMF and World Bank policies, but to reimagine the purpose of multilateralism itself toward a feminist economic architecture grounded in equity, accountability, and the right to live with dignity. If the Fund wishes to remain credible in an era of overlapping crises, it must redefine fiscal sustainability beyond numerical targets toward a framework that centers equity and human rights principles approach.