Programmatically rendering a Views pane with arguments from context
I got it to work with

$selected_type = 'views_panes';
$selected_subtype = 'persona_display-panel_pane_1';
$context = array(
  'context_taxonomy_term_1' =&gt; ctools_context_create('entity:taxonomy_term', $fully_loaded_taxonomy_term);
);
$config = array(
  'context' =&gt; array('context_taxonomy_term_1');
);
ctools_content_render($selected_type, $selected_subtype, $config, array(), array(), $context);


So, in order to render a Views Pane display with contextual filters coming from the pane's context you to populate $context and inform the display handler on which entries of $context to use for each contextual filter with $config['context'].