May 15th 2024, by Marta Musić

AWID’s current strategic plan, Fierce Feminisms – Together We Rise, was a call to take on brave conversations and actions. As we embarked on the quest to co-create our strategic plan and the theory of change underpinning it, Octavia Butler’s words of wisdom served as our moral and political compass through a journey of much unlearning and relearning, individually and in community:

“All that you touch. You Change. All that you Change Changes you.” (Butler, 1993: 3)

Our search for a feminist theory of change shed light on how mainstream theories of change of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) are deeply rooted in White, eurocentric, positivist, and masculinist assumptions about the world, knowledge, and what “progress” or “change” means. We were troubled by how these theories of change typically claimed to know what is best for the rest of the world and sought to impose universalistic, one-size-fits-all solutions in a top-down manner. We also noticed deep-seated assumptions about change being a linear process.

As feminists critical of the current economic system, we could not help but trace this issue back to the co-optation and institutionalisation of social movements into the capitalist machinery in the 1990s, a phenomenon more commonly referred to as “NGO-isation” which came hand-in-hand with a global shift to neoliberalism. Add to that the arrival of progressive philanthropy with in-built business-oriented models of success focusing on quantitative targets, and voilà, INGOs were obliged to operate under SMART frameworks and focus on short-term objectives (to facilitate gathering quantitative data and measuring short-term successes) to continue getting funding. We were all stuck on a hamster wheel, limiting the radical potential of our long-term programmatic work!

Clearly, the assumptions and approaches underpinning mainstream theories of change were not only fallacious, reductionist (and not very feminist), but they were also harmful to the movements and our organisations.

Acknowledging that we are part of this machinery, how could we move towards a feminist theory of change that is politically aligned with our values, that can be embodied in practice at AWID, and that can help us unleash our political imaginations?

Questions such as “Who are we to determine what change is needed?” or “Who are we to determine how change happens?” kept us grounded and humbled throughout the process. As a movement-support organisation, we wanted to reflect AWID’s commitment to support movements in achieving the changes they were striving for. Against the backdrop of universalistic, top-down theories of change and worldviews, we felt the need to generate organic understandings of change grounded in the irreducible complexities of real life and movement realities.

We began by listening to the multiple ways in which feminists and movements experience, understand and theorise what change means. We heard from the needs and experiences of movements driving change in different sectors of our economies, material conditions, mindsets, languages, discourses, narratives, relationships, consciousness and more.

Through and in conversation with movements, allies and other stakeholders, we grew in our understanding of the complexity and plurality of change. We learned how change can be specific in some cases and abstract in others, how it cuts across temporalities, geographies and scales, and how it exceeds mere logic and involves a whole range of powerful emotions and drives. We also gained insights on the plurality of actors, people, movements and organisations involved in collectively driving change (and how many of these actors are often invisible). While our theory of change recognises that sometimes, there might be one particular entry point, tactic or approach we will prioritise when striving to achieve a certain change, that particular action is still part of a broader, overarching, complex and plural ecosystem.

The way we understand change shapes our work (i.e., how we position ourselves to best support feminist movements), and it also influences the way we do monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning (MEAL) and how we communicate our work.

Building a theory of change that can encapsulate the plurality and complexity of political change and break away from conventional (and patriarchal) frameworks that are reductionist and harmful is fundamental. We need a theory of change that makes sense to us as feminist movements and one that allows us to maintain a level of political integrity between what we say and what we do (both internally and externally).

This, in turn, leads to more meaningful relationships, better support and more accountability towards the feminist movements we seek to support. Finally, it also equips us with the tools to advocate for more flexible, core, unrestricted funding and to address issues generated by philanthropy and international aid that prevent organisations from undertaking politically relevant and radical work.

Our search for a feminist theory of change took several months and many hours of reflective conversations. We do not claim to have reached our destination, but we can see the paths ahead more clearly, and we look forward to continuing this journey of exploration. We hope that our story of this journey inspires you to join us in further reclaiming our movement-support work away from the clutches of capitalist business models permeating the INGO sector while unleashing the feminist political radicality of our work to collectively rise up to the challenges of the current context.