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Transnational Networks and Policy Diffusion: The Case of Gender Mainstreaming
Abstract
How can we account for the global diffusion of remarkably similar policy innovations across widely differing nation-states? In an era characterized by heightened globalization and increasingly radical state restructuring, this question has become especially acute. Scholars of international relations offer a number of theoretical explanations for the cross-national convergence of ideas, institutions, and interests. We examine the proliferation of state bureaucracies for gender mainstreaming. These organizations seek to integrate a gender-equality perspective across all areas of government policy. Although they so far have received scant attention outside of feminist policy circles, these mainstreaming bureaucracies—now in place in over 100 countries—represent a powerful challenge to business-as-usual politics and policymaking. As a policy innovation, the speed with which these institutional mechanisms have been adopted by the majority of national governments is unprecedented. We argue that transnational networks composed largely of nonstate actors (notably women's international nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations) have been the primary forces driving the diffusion of gender mainstreaming. In an event history analysis of 157 nation-states from 1975 to 1998, we assess how various national and transnational factors have affected the timing and the type of the institutional changes these states have made. Our findings support the claim that the diffusion of gender-mainstreaming mechanisms has been facilitated by the role played by transnational networks, in particular by the transnational feminist movement. Further, they suggest a major shift in the nature and the locus of global politics and national policymaking.
... The aforementioned analysis could spark some policy guidelines in the framework of gender mainstreaming. Gender mainstreaming is defined as "efforts to scrutinize and re-invent processes of policy formation and implementation across all issue areas to address and rectify persistent and emerging disparities between men and women" [65]. Using this policy framework objective and based on our findings of daily mobility issues, three axes of intervention can be identified: knowledge enhancement, offer of tailor-made mobility services and urban mobility planning responding to gender needs [34]. ...
... While diffusion research is mainly concerned with international factors responsible for such isomorphic change, externally imposed demands are not considered to be the sole determinants of the policies adopted by countries. In fact, empirical evidence indicates that there is substantial heterogeneity in the national incorporation of a range of programs espoused by the neoliberal order (Lee & Strang, 2006;Swank, 2006;True & Mintrom, 2001). Similarly, the spread of stock markets in the past several decades has been rapid but not as ubiquitous (Clayton, Jorgensen, & Kavajecz, 2006). ...
Over the past three decades norms research has become a subfield that matters beyond the boundaries of the discipline of International Relations. Like other such generative processes this subfield’s path is marked by debates over conceptual and methodological preferences. This book argues that irrespective of how we understand these divides, the critical question for today’s norms researchers becomes: how have our understandings of norms developed over this period? To address this question this book brings together a range of junior, mid-career, and senior scholars, working at the leading edge of norm research, across a diversity of issues and sub-fields, and using different epistemological perspectives. Two lenses feature in this endeavour: the first considers the history of norm research as a series of three distinct and theoretical moves (i.e., first creating an interest in ideas and social facts in IR, then focusing on norm adaptation, and finally shifting to a view of norms as processes), and the second examines the potential of practices of interpretation and contestation (which we term the ‘interpretation-contestation framework’) as a way of bringing together a range of theoretical tools to understand norm change, evolution, and replacement. In short, this book focuses on the past trajectory of the field to argue that norm research continues to hold significant potential and promise both about theorizing within IR, and for studying current issues and problems in world politics.
Over the past two decades, we have seen a significant shift in the norms literature away from the idea that a norm reflects a fixed and universally accepted shared understanding to notions that any norm – even those which appear to be widely institutionalized in international organisations of global governance – remains subject to contestation and interpretation at multiple sites in world politics. In this concluding chapter, we take up the challenge of studying these diverse types of norms and their meaning, use, and role in practice. We begin by returning to the three moves laid out in the introduction – first creating an interest in ideas and social facts in IR, then focusing on norm adaptation, and finally shifting to a view of norms as processes – and use as a vignette the forced landing of Ryanair Flight 4978 in Belarus in May 2021 to explore how each of these three moves can explain these events. We then draw out three sets of conclusions from the volume’s chapters, focusing on the process of contestation and interpretation, on how we can research contestations, and how other structures can and do interact with norms during these processes. We end by noting that the distinct approaches to norm research developed over the past thirty years do speak to one another in meaningful and innovative ways. By focusing on contestation in a holistic way, we can not only understand norms in a unique way but also how they constitute the world.
Motivation
Gender mainstreaming is often promoted internationally as the vehicle of choice to achieve gender equality. Concepts of mainstreaming are commonly seen in climate‐smart agriculture (CSA), where it is proposed that they can bridge gender gaps in agricultural input use and productivity. The rhetoric of mainstreaming, however, often relies upon and perpetuates gender myths and assumptions.
Purpose
We investigate how gender mainstreaming has spread into Tanzania's agricultural policies. We ask whether the government has the capacity to put these concepts into practice to address gender inequality. We explore this in the context of CSA, an increasingly important aspect of agricultural policy.
Methods and approach
Using the literature on policy transfer and isomorphism, we critically analyse gendered discourse in Tanzania's CSA policies to explore how gender is problematised and governed within policy. We use NVivo 12 to inductively code policy documents. We support these insights with the observations of key informants.
Findings
We find little evidence that gender has been effectively mainstreamed in Tanzania's CSA policies. We see a gap between the normative goal of gender mainstreaming and the practices intended to address gender (and intersectional) inequalities. The gap is made all the wider by limited recognition within government‐from national to local—of how such inequalities affect agriculture. Not only are policies detached from local contexts leading to infeasible plans, but also local government lacks both resources and capacity to implement them.
Policy implications
Our study calls into question much of the global discourse on gender mainstreaming, especially the myths that support it. It shows how representing the problem in a particular way can lead to dysfunctional policy.
A better approach would be to start with understanding the various inequalities seen in agriculture in Tanzania, inequalities of gender but also of class. It would take into account the capacity to implement policy in the field. A more practical approach, tailored to the realities of rural Tanzania, would benefit the people of Tanzania more than just imitating questionable international discourse.
This book provides a major review of the state of international theory. It is focused around the issue of whether the positivist phase of international theory is now over, or whether the subject remains mainly positivistic. Leading scholars analyse the traditional theoretical approaches in the discipline, then examine the issues and groups which are marginalised by mainstream theory, before turning to four important new developments in international theory (historical sociology, post-structuralism, feminism, and critical theory). The book concludes with five chapters which look at the future of the subject and the practice of international relations. This survey brings together key figures who have made leading contributions to the development of mainstream and alternative theory, and will be a valuable text for both students and scholars of international relations.
The 1990s have seen the emergence of a new 'constructivist' approach to international theory and analysis. This article is concerned with the relationship between constructivism and critical international theory, broadly defined. Contrary to the claims of several prominent critical theorists of the Third Debate, we argue that constructivism has its intellectual roots in critical social theory, and that the constructivist project of conceptual elaboration and empirical analysis need not violate the principal epistemological, methodological or normative tenets of critical international theory. Furthermore, we contend that constructivism can make a vital contribution to the development of critical international theory, offering crucial insights into the sociology of moral community in world politics. The advent of constructivism should thus be seen as a positive development, one that not only enables critical theorists to mount a more powerful challenge to the dominant rationalist theories, but one that also promises to advance critical international theory itself.
The constructivist study of norms faces two central challenges-reintegrating agency into its largely structural accounts and unpacking its arguments at the national level. This article addresses these issues, and does so in four parts. First, I briefly review the burgeoning constructivist literature, exploring the ontological and theoretical reasons for its neglect of agency. Second, by adding social content to the concept of diffusion, the transmission mechanism linking international norms to domestic change, I explain the motivation of domestic actors to accept new normative prescriptions, thus making a start at restoring agency to constructivist accounts. Third, I argue these key actors will vary cross-nationally as a function of state-society relations ('domestic structure'). Fourth, the argument is applied to the politics of national identity in post-Cold War Europe. In particular, I examine the degree to which international norms are affecting debates over citizenship and national minorities in contemporary Germany, with empirical data drawn from the European human rights regime centered on the Council of Europe.
Whether the state and the bureaucracy can be viable arenas for promoting improvements in the condition of women's lives is an especially pressing question for Latin American feminism today. Until recent years, feminists in the region completely dismissed state-centered political strategies and pressure-group tactics. Indeed, during the two decades when military authoritarianism reigned supreme in South America, the state was most often viewed as women's worst enemy. At the rhetorical level authoritarian rulers extolled the virtues of motherhood and traditional womanhood. Yet in reality their policies brought about dramatic changes in women's social, economic, and political roles and, ultimately, in their consciousness as women. Regressive economic policies pushed millions of women into low-paying, low-status jobs in the least progressive, most exploitive sectors of the economy. Authoritarian development policies undermined working-class survival strategies, propelling hundreds of thousands of women to seek solutions to their families' needs by participating in the community self-help organizations and grassroots social movements that blossomed throughout Latin America in the 1970s. And the repressive social policies and exclusionary politics characteristic of bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes also drew women of all social classes in unprecedented numbers into the swelling ranks of the political opposition to military rule.1 These rapid changes in women's roles helped spark a second wave of the women's movement in South America. Working-class feminine groups and middle-class feminist organizations could be found throughout the region by the late 1970s.2 And by the early 1980s women's groups had mobilized hundreds of thousands of women in protest of the detrimental effects of authoritarian development on women's lives and lives of all politically excluded social groups and classes. Originally, most women's groups, like other opposition organizations in civil society, engaged exclusively in the politics of protest and in promoting grassroots survival efforts. But as authoritarianism began to crumble in the late 1970s and the military ushered in "political liberalization" schemes of various types and durations, women's movement activists began making gender-based claims on the state and political society. The return of civilian rule and political efforts to consolidate precarious democracies in South America in the 1980s now pose new challenges for feminist theory and practice in the region.3 The opposition political parties who courted the female electorate and appealed to organized female constituencies during the final stages of the transition to democracy are now in power. As newly established democratic regimes "seek to legitimize themselves through public policy and participation-based accountability" (Staudt, in Chapter 1), feminist claims have perilously made their way into male-dominant policy-making arenas. In some countries, such as Brazil, the new civilian regimes have endorsed such historic feminist demands as safe, accessible, noncoercive family planning, publicly financed day care, and equal pay for equal work and have established new government "machineries" for the promotion of gender equity. Brazilian feminists are confronted with a new conjuncture in gender politics.4 The state, heretofore widely perceived to be women's worst enemy, is suddenly portraying itself as women's best friend.