MENAFem’s Interventions at the 2025 IMF–WB Annual Meetings: A Feminist and Southern Reading of the Global Financial System

MENAFem’s participation in the 2025 Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank took place at a moment when economic contraction, debt crises, climate breakdown, and widening inequality converge, while the global financial system continues to impose its neoliberal logic as the only possible remedy. In this context, participation was not a technical exercise or a follow-up engagement, but rather a political and feminist stance from within the Global South, one grounded in a fundamental question: who defines reform, and who pays its price?
Over the past two years, the movement has closely observed what has been termed the “Reform of the Global Financial Architecture,” a process that emerged from the Seville Compromiso, presented as a historic consensus among governments, financial institutions, and civil society to rebuild a fairer system. Yet this “consensus” soon revealed its symbolic nature: a rhetorical exercise that transformed the promise of structural transformation into a linguistic document affirming intentions without addressing power. Instead of confronting questions of accountability and dominance, the outcome was phrased in broad, conciliatory language that preserved appearances while concealing the continuity of the same power structures that govern the global economy.
Since Seville, there has been no tangible reform in the mechanisms or representation of the international financial system. The Bretton Woods Institutions remain bound by an inequitable voting structure that grants disproportionate control to creditor nations, leaving debtor countries confined to a passive role. These arrangements are often portrayed as technical necessities, yet in essence they are political: they determine who speaks in the name of “stability,” and who is condemned to austerity. The documents that followed Seville merely reiterated notions of resilience, sustainability, and cooperation, without establishing any binding or oversight mechanisms that could turn discourse into practice. This void allows financial justice to be invoked rhetorically while the same policies continue to entrench inequality.
Behind this reformist discourse lies the enduring orthodoxy of fiscal conservatism, deficit control, subsidy cuts, currency devaluation, and an overreliance on markets. The outcome is a recurring cycle of managed crises rather than resolved ones: each new wave of austerity is presented as a temporary path to prosperity, even as social divides widen and state capacities to protect their populations erode. Within this dynamic, the language of reform functions as a cosmetic operation for an unchanged structure of domination.
Missing Accountability and Selective Transparency
A central dilemma of the current financial order is the absence of genuine accountability mechanisms that link financial institutions to their human-rights, environmental, and social obligations. The recurring call for “coordination among institutions” has remained an administrative slogan, used to justify policy overlap rather than to correct it. Nobody exists to ensure that IMF policies align with UN commitments or the Paris Agreement, nor are there independent assessments of their social or gender impacts. Accountability has thus become an internal formality; crucial decisions remain shielded from democratic scrutiny. The result is a repetitive cycle of meetings, joint statements, and follow-up committees without authority, while market logic continues to override human rights.
Symbolic Participation and the Legitimization of Decisions
Across these processes, civil society, including feminist movements, is often invited to participate symbolically rather than substantively. During the Seville process, broad consultation spaces were opened, yet core decisions had already been made. Movements were permitted to contribute to the language and vision, but not to the substance of policy or its enforcement mechanisms. Such limited engagement grants formal legitimacy to outcomes that were never designed from the lived realities of those most affected. Consequently, notions such as “country ownership” and “consultation” have been transformed into rhetorical devices that cosmetically validate existing hierarchies, offering the Global South a voice in the conversation about justice, but not the power to define it.
The Arab Region as a Laboratory of Austerity
Recent experiences in the Arab region expose the true nature of IMF policies. Since 2011, the Fund has portrayed itself as a partner in reform and in addressing inequality in the wake of the Arab Spring. In practice, it has deepened these very inequalities. In Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, structural adjustment programs resulted in sharp subsidy cuts, price liberalization, wage freezes, and shrinking public budgets for health and education. Poverty rates doubled, inflation soared, and public services deteriorated, while external debt reached unprecedented levels. Every major wave of social unrest in the region, from Egypt’s bread riots to Morocco’s recent protests, finds its roots in these programs, where economic policy and public anger meet in a closed circuit of recurring crises.
Within that circuit, women have always stood at the center, working in the informal economy, shouldering unpaid care work, or reducing their own consumption to ensure household survival. In these contexts, austerity is not a form of fiscal discipline; it is a structure of economic and gendered violence that shifts the burden of survival onto women while presenting such adaptation as “natural resilience.”
Toward a Feminist and Southern Vision of Financial Justice
These realities reveal that the global financial system does not require better coordination among its institutions as much as it requires a fundamental redefinition of its foundations. Economic justice cannot be separated from gender and climate justice, nor achieved without political accountability from financial institutions that shape the destinies of entire societies without democratic mandate. The needed transformation is not about refining lending instruments or conditionalities, but about redistributing power and knowledge within the system itself, from the center to the peripheries, from financial elites to affected communities, from abstract economics to lived material realities.
In its radical sense, a just transition entails moving beyond market logic as the sole point of reference and recognizing that genuine stability is measured not by growth rates but by people’s ability to live dignified lives. It also demands acknowledging that the Global South is not merely the subject of policy but a political and epistemic actor with the right to imagine and construct alternatives grounded in everyday life.
Rethinking the Meaning of Change
The recurrent calls for a “new global financial system” remain hollow unless accompanied by a genuine willingness to interrogate the very structures that reproduce crises. The problem lies not in the lack of summits or action plans, but in the persistent reluctance to redefine the economy as a domain of social justice rather than a tool of control.
Feminist and Southern experiences remind us that resistance to this logic does not begin at the level of policy design alone, but at the level of rethinking the relationship between work and care, between development and dignity, reconnecting what the dominant system has deliberately separated. In this sense, the struggle of the Global South is not a reaction to crisis; it is an active practice of rewriting the rules that govern the world and the meanings of justice within it.