Politics today is marked by accelerating global backlash against both gender equality and action on the climate crisis. This new working paper exposes how these two agendas are increasingly converging in Global Majority countries.

In recent years, the world has witnessed an accelerating trend of far-right and authoritarian politics emerging across diverse country contexts. This politics is often defined by an increasing turn to anti-gender and anti-climate positions to consolidate power and mobilise voters.

These authoritarian forces have tended to instrumentalise oppositional rhetoric to gender equality and climate action to undermine these agendas, rolling back progressive policies at home and blocking progress in the international arena. While some research has explored how this regression manifests in Western contexts, very little is known about how these regressive agendas converge in Global Majority countries.

This ODI Global working paper is based on a deep dive into the political motivations, conditions and outcomes that shape this heightened opposition at both the national and multilateral level. The evidence explores ways in which anti-gender, anti-climate and authoritarian politics combine in eight countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Türkiye, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, surfacing three main categories of political opposition to progressive gender and climate policies.

Report by the Overseas Development Institute