This paper analyzes the parallels in the social, legal and policy challenges to LGBTI inclusion and abortion rights in Zambia, and implications for donor engagement. Drawing on qualitative field research on Canada’s engagement in sexual and reproductive health in Zambia – involving 44 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Zambian and Canadian stakeholders – it answers the question, what explains the prevailing conflation of abortion, broader sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and LGBTI rights in Zambia, and what are its implications? The paper shows how LGBTI rights and abortion are stigmatized in similar ways, at the intersection of restrictive legal and policy frameworks, and religious prejudices. The state’s restriction of those rights reinforces its control over individuals’ sexual autonomy and delegitimizes SRHR more generally, with negative health consequences that go beyond LGBTI people and women needing abortion care, essentially limiting SRHR to family planning. This creates an unfortunate paradox: efforts to achieve greater social inclusion, often promoted by aid donors and other external actors, are actually leading to more state restrictions on SRHR and rights overall. As such, these initiatives require a more nuanced approach, one that is more sensitive to the complex contexts of SRHR and that prioritizes the perspectives of Zambian LGBTI and abortion rights advocates.

Workers’ institutions such as trade unions and workers’ centres are crucial for organizing workers. However, in much of the Global South, the ability of these institutions to reach out to women workers is limited. Taking as a case study the garment workers in Bangladesh, this paper explores the ways in workers and activists attempt to overcome the historic ban on trade unions in the country's largest export-earning industry by organizing beyond the production floor in spaces of social reproduction. In doing so, this paper bridges theories of social reproduction (Vogel, 1983; Bhattacharya, 2017) with a materialist reading of affect (Hennessy, 2013; Chun, 2016) to offer an analytical framework with which to better understand a critical aspect of labour organizing in Bangladesh that is often missed, particularly in the context of women’s activism: the development of affective communities. I argue that at once hidden and overlooked, these communities – and therefore, relationships – that women cultivate span from workplaces to spaces of social reproduction are crucial for developing the capacities for activism and strengthening workers’ institutions themselves.

In 2016 the Colombian Government under then-President Santos and the largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC) signed a peace deal to end 5 decades of internal conflict. In the same year, Canada pledged $57.4M in development funding to help Colombia recover in the post-peace deal era. Since 2016 the Peace and Stabilisation Operations Program (PSOPs) alone has invested $35.3M in the country. With the launch of Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) in 2017, many of these initiatives unfolded in a new policy context and were characterised by commitments to make gender equality a priority. This paper looks at the intersection of Canadian aid, transitional justice, and gender in Colombia through a feminist-institutionalist lens. It aims to assess the impact of Canadian-funded projects from these areas in Colombia along a spectrum that varies from ‘gendered transitional justice’ to ‘transformative transitional justice’. The paper concludes that the impact of Canadian assistance is found in the in-between area of ‘gendered transitional justice’ and ‘transformative transitional justice’, characterized by some progress away from the status quo of ‘gendered transitional justice’, but without hitting the transformative mark. Through a feminist institutionalist lens, I argue that it is the complex socio-political landscape of Colombia overlaying the agency of Canada’s implementing partners, their Southern counterparts and the agency of the donor, and the sum of these interactions that both enable and limit the full transformative capacity of the intervention and situate its impact somewhere in the middle. The study applies mixed methods, including 28 semi-structure interviews with key informants in Ottawa and Bogota.

The paper aims to examine how The Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) shaped efforts of civil society organizations to address gender equality through organizational and programmatic change. FIAP and other feminist policies have direct implications in how organizations design and administer their work to address gender inequality, and on how funding agencies and foundations administer and support this work. What are the opportunities and limitations to the Feminist International Assistance Policy’s implementation based on experiences of civil society organizations’ efforts to address gender inequality? Data collection for this article took place between 2019 and 2021, beginning two years after the launch of the FIAP. This research adopted a mixed-method, grounded theory approach, where the data collected shaped the conceptual framework. An online survey, interviews, participatory

workshops, and media analysis were included in the data collection. Staff from civil society organizations and the University of Ottawa supported the research design process. Analysis from data collected in 2019 with gender specialists and staff of CSOs, as well as analysis of media coverage of challenges faced by feminist organizations in 2020 and 2021 revealed that the potential for CSO investment through staff support, (financial, training and government guidance) could

only be partially realized within the structural landscape in which development agencies oversee the administration of underrepresented groups.This study demonstrates the limitations but also the opportunities for building stronger linkages between policy formation and implementation processes. The authors argue that strengthening engagement with feminist networks globally could align policy priorities with those identified by grassroots movements, while influencing how funding agencies value feminist practice in civil society organizations.