Unsettling settler-colonialism in Gender and Development: reflections from Aotearoa New Zealand

In November 2020, the first woman Indigenous Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nanaia Mahuta, was appointed in Aotearoa New Zealand. Mahuta has reinforced the message of taking a values-based Indigenous-centred approach to foreign policy and development. She has also recognised the mana of wāhine (the unique spiritual authority of women), “not defined by western feminist thinking, but the values that have long underpinned our culture, histories and traditions”. Her appointment reflects the complicated intersections of Indigeneity, colonialism, Western feminist discourse, and foreign policy in a settler-hegemonic state, and the possibilities (and constraints) for reimagined futures. How, then, can the teaching of gender and development (GAD) be attentive to these politics of settler-colonialism in Aotearoa? How can the complexities of the colonial project be reflected in GAD, and how can GAD be responsive to settler-hegemonic and Indigenous spaces? This paper will explore these questions and look at GAD’s role in perpetuating or unsettling settler-colonialism.