Policy framing and resistance: Gender mainstreaming in Horizon 2020

Scholarship on gender mainstreaming (GM) in the European Union (EU) consistently highlights the disappointing implementation of gender mainstreaming. This article contributes to that discussion through the analysis of the first policy frame on gender equality in the work programmes of the EU’s Framework Programme for Research and Development, Horizon 2020, from 2014 until 2016. This article analyses how GM as a transformative strategy is contextualised by advisory group experts, and what is being achieved within Horizon 2020 work programmes. In opposition to the Commission’s rhetorical commitment to GM, this article demonstrates that Horizon 2020 work programmes exemplify a failure of implementing GM, further depoliticising gender equality in the Commission’s neoliberal context.

Beyond the National: How the EU, OECD, and World Bank Do Family Policy

In recent decades, numerous international organizations have adopted positions that use components of a policy frame familiar from family policy at the national level. They sought to advance one or more of three classic goals of that domain: stabilizing demography, ensuring income security, and supporting parents’ labor force participation. This chapter tracks the last several decades of policy action in three international organizations—the European Union, the OECD, and the World Bank. It documents the changing interventions of each organization that touch on these three goals, whether or not the organization claims to be committed to having family policy. The analysis focuses in particular on the expressed policy goal(s), the targets and policy instruments, and the policy frame used to justify each. The main finding is that despite different trajectories over time the three share processes leading to non-familialization via greater emphasis on individuals and often children.

Twin Peaks

This chapter provides an overview of the book’s main themes. It discusses the notion of a complexity frame, which is a fundamentally different policy frame provided by complexity science. The central policy choice in a complexity frame is not the market or the government. The goal of policy in the complexity frame is not to choose one or the other. Instead, policy is seen as affecting a complex evolving system that cannot be controlled. But while it cannot be controlled, it can be influenced, and policymakers have to continually think how to work with evolutionary pressures, and try to guide those pressures toward desirable ends. Within the complexity frame, top-down control actions are a last resort. Their use suggests that you have failed in your previous attempts to get the ecostructure right.