DAWN Roundtable at IAFFE Annual Conference 2025: Global South Feminist Perspectives on Macroeconomics

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The Grip of Finance: Global South Feminist Perspectives on Macroeconomics at IAFFE 2025, the annual conference of the International Association for Feminist Economics

By Noelia Méndez Santolaria (based on collective input from the project’s core team and support from AI*)

We arrived at UMass by train, after the tense experience of entering New York City from the Global South—navigating visa restrictions and the often-hostile atmosphere of immigration at United States airports. Amherst, a small university town with green paths, forest trails, and a near-empty campus in the middle of the U.S. summer, offered a brief respite. But that calm was quickly unsettled. Conversations with colleagues reminded us that, despite the generosity and warmth of our hosts, the organisers of the Conference, our presence was not entirely welcomed in the broader political context. ICE, the immigration enforcement agency, had recently been active in the area; budget cuts are hitting universities hard, and the political climate continues to shrink the space for independent critical thinking and science.

All of this framed the atmosphere in which we gathered for the DAWN roundtable at IAFFE 2025. In the heart of the global North, we carved out a space for South-South feminist convergence—insisting on the urgency of building bridges with allies, and of creating new vocabularies and frameworks to rethink macroeconomics from a transformative perspective. 

Our session featured the authors, two of them online, of four papers from DAWN’s new series on macroeconomics —representing Argentina, Ghana, Brazil, and Sri Lanka. The series aims to unpack the “grip of finance” in contemporary capitalism from a feminist perspective, combining theoretical insights with grounded case studies. The roundtable also aimed to foster dialogue between DAWN researchers and IAFFE conference participants, bridging scholarship and activism across geographies. Each intervention—from both panelists and participants—added a piece to the larger puzzle we are collectively trying to understand and transform.

The panel opened with a presentation by Corina Rodríguez Enríquez, who outlined the conceptual framework underpinning DAWN’s macroeconomics project. This framework builds on decades of feminist political economy thinking in the global South and proposes a systemic approach to macroeconomic analysis. Rather than simply “adding care and stirring,” the framework places economic questions within broader systems shaped by intersecting power relations, colonial legacies, environmental limits, and financial logics. Rodríguez Enríquez emphasised the importance of methodological creativity, theoretical openness, and the exercise of feminist epistemology, “building knowledge from reality to change reality”. She invited us to clearly define the question we want to answer and then select the methodology best suited to address it, combining quantitative and qualitative methods, rather than shaping our inquiry to fit only the already available or widely recognised methods and to change the very questions asked in macroeconomic analysis in order to find transformative answers. 

Building on this foundation, Lena Lavinas offered a powerful analysis of financialisation as the dominant force in contemporary capitalism. She described how the logic of assetisation—where goods like housing, water, and care become financial instruments—has penetrated every sphere of social life. Indebtedness, Lavinas argued, has become both pervasive and normalised, not just among individuals but across governments. This shift redefines public services not as rights, but as opportunities for generating returns on investment. Gender bonds and sustainability-linked finance, though a bailout for fiscally restrained governments, deepen market dependency, increase austerity, fuel rentierism and undermine the rule of law and human rights. Lavinas warned that under this regime, states are being transformed into facilitators of financial accumulation, prioritising profit over people and returns over rights.

Dzifa Torvikey, speaking from Ghana, brought these themes into sharp relief and showed how debt operates as a mechanism of neocolonial control. She traced the roots of the country’s 2022 sovereign debt default, contextualising it within colonial legacies, extractive economic structures, and the discipline of credit markets. Ghana’s embrace of eurobonds and the IMF’s policy conditionalities reflect a system designed to maintain dependency and prioritise debt repayment over human development. This reproduces structural violence, hollowing out public services and leaving young generations with limited futures. Dzifa’s intervention was a call for delinking—politically, economically, imaginatively—from the institutions that keep us indebted and dependent.

From Sri Lanka, Vagisha Gunasekara offered a compelling critique of how consent for neoliberal reform is manufactured. In her analysis, the country’s default and subsequent IMF program were not inevitable responses to crisis, but rather the result of elite interests, technocratic influence, and creditor capture. Gunasekara described how austerity and legal reforms were framed as solutions, while social resistance was co-opted or sidelined. Even progressive movements, she argued, were drawn into governance narratives that ultimately legitimised further structural adjustment and austerity. Her analysis underscored how financialised capitalism operates through soft power—transforming public debate, constraining democratic agency and crippling sovereignty. She called for reframing the debate to recognise debt as a “tool of extraction” and “gender violence in its macroeconomic form”, challenge the legitimacy of debt and build cross-border alliances for collective resistance.

The Q&A session extended these reflections. Participants from Nigeria, Colombia, El Salvador, Zambia, and the Philippines echoed the patterns described by the panellists in their own countries. The use of debt as a tool of control, the instrumentalisation of remittances, and the complicity of national elites were recurrent themes. Several voices questioned whether meaningful reform of global financial institutions is still possible—or whether new systems must be built altogether. Across contributions, the connections between debt, migration, climate vulnerability, and the erosion of wellbeing were made visible.

As the roundtable drew to a close, a shared clarity emerged: the “grip of finance” is not merely economic—it is social, political, ecological, and deeply gendered- and it is urgent to build these narratives into social movements. Financialisation has reshaped not only budgets and institutions, but also the narratives through which we understand policy, legitimacy, and possibility. For feminist economics in the Global South, this demands a fundamental shift: transforming the very foundations of the economic system and grounding it in care, sovereignty, and solidarity.

*To improve style and delivery, we used ChatGPT to support the writing process, ensuring clarity and coherence — the ideas and experiences are all human and the process was guided by human perspective.