How have recent governance reforms across Europe affected gender equality policy and the relationship between gender equality and the economy? Anna Elomäki and Hanna Ylöstalo present findings from a new book on the governance of gender equality policy in Finland.
Gender equality policy in international and national contexts is shaped by shifting political priorities but also by transforming public governance. The requirements of good and efficient governance are in constant flux and reflect international and domestic public governance trends that play out differently in different national contexts.
In a recent book, we analysed how public trends and their implementation have affected gender equality policy and gender equality-economy relations in Finland, a Nordic welfare state that is often viewed as a model country for gender equality. We zoomed in on four trends prominent in the 2010s: strategic governance, the shift from welfare to workfare, economic governance reforms including gender budgeting, and evidence-based policy. Adding up and comparing their effects allowed us to paint a complex picture of the interrelationships between the shifting public governance, national gender equality policy and political struggles around gender equality.
Economised and depoliticised gender equality and a silent backlash
Public governance reforms are reforms by stealth. They are often planned and implemented without much political controversy and public debate and presented as technical and pragmatic, detached from political priorities and ideologies. Yet they impact what issues, knowledge and policymaking tools are considered relevant in different policy fields, and how policy fields relate to each other. They also affect where, when and by whom decisions are made, who is consulted and how.
Public governance reforms impact gender equality policy too – often in ways that decrease its transformative potential through depoliticising and economising gender equality policy. These reforms often revolve around prioritising economic goals or extending economic goals, ideas and practices to all policy fields. This affects the goals, discourses, practices and content of gender equality policy, often in ways that legitimise economic goals and ideas detrimental to gender equality. Public governance reforms also tend to sideline gendered power relations and analyses of inequality.
For instance, in Finland workfare strategies have narrowed the meaning of gender equality to women’s labour market participation, and gender equality policies have become tools to push mothers of young children into the labour market. Gender budgeting practices have constructed gender equality and the economy in depoliticised ways that obscure gendered inequalities in the political economy and reify gendered understandings of the economy.
The gender equality backlash caused by the shifting public governance is not a noisy campaign, such as for anti-genderism, but a silent one. It does not necessarily involve an open political conflict but rather occurs through non-contested governance reforms presented as neutral and pragmatic. Perhaps the best example of this in our work is the way the strategic governance reform that the Finnish government implemented in the mid-2010s pushed gender equality off the government’s agenda and narrowed the scope and goals of gender equality policy.
The government included conservative and anti-feminist parties for whom weakening at least some aspects of gender equality policy was an ideological goal. The emphasis on few horizontal priorities, short documents and achievable goals characteristic of strategic governance allowed the government to present the sidelining and weakening of gender equality policy as a pragmatic, strategic decision related to good governance rather than a political one.
Strategic openings for gender equality change
Although public governance reforms have resulted in a loss of transformative potential of gender equality policy, they have also involved strategic openings. For instance, the idea of focusing on horizontal priorities and strengthening cross-sectoral collaboration typical of strategic governance could be used to strengthen gender equality policy and gender mainstreaming. Similarly, gender budgeting has provided gender equality actors with new tools to politicise economic policies and gain a foothold in an area of public governance where they were previously excluded.
Gender equality actors also make use of old and new public governance trends to advance their goals. In our work, this was perhaps most visible in the case of evidence-based policy. Feminist knowledge producers in Finland aiming to influence economic policies have used the language and methods of economics and formed strategic partnerships with non-feminist economists and statisticians to provide policy-relevant knowledge.
This strategy risked legitimising existing evidence hierarchies, de-democratising feminist discussions around economic policies and detaching feminist knowledge from feminism as a transformative political movement. Despite these shortcomings, such knowledge-based feminist strategies have politicised economic and fiscal policies by exposing their gendered impacts and demanding alternatives to austerity policies.
Governance reforms shape gender equality-economy relations
One of the starting points of our research was the importance of economies and economic policies for gender equality policy and feminist analysis of public governance. One of our main findings was that next to gender equality policy, shifts in public governance also shape what we have called gender equality-economy relations.
In the sphere of public governance and policy, the struggles around gender equality-economy relations take place at two intertwined levels. The surface level of everyday policymaking and governance entails discourses and institutional practices that may either enhance or challenge the economisation of gender equality policies and discourses. Beneath is the level of ideas and understandings relating to struggles over the gendered boundaries of the economy.
The public governance trends that we analysed have shaped gender equality-economy relations at both levels. At the level of policymaking and governance, they have strengthened hierarchies between economic goals and gender equality goals and economised gender equality policy. However, these trends have also opened doors for a feminist transformation of gender equality-economy relations. For instance, policy discourses connected to feminist economic policy have challenged dominant economic policy goals.
At the level of ideas and understandings, questions related to knowledge come to the fore. The emphasis on evidence-based policy has affected the kind of knowledge about gender equality and the economy being produced and circulated in policymaking. A crucial concern from a feminist perspective is whether the modes of knowledge and knowledge production prioritised in public governance can account for social reproduction – defined here as unpaid and waged reproductive labour and public provisioning. Again, we could observe steps back and forth.
Gender equality policy should reconfigure gender equality-economy relations
Given the shifting public governance with its economising and depoliticising tendencies, how and under what conditions can gender equality policy transform gender equality-economy relations? Although gender equality policy can never be fully separate from the capitalist and neoliberal logics of contemporary states, it has, in our view, the potential to support broader feminist efforts to reconfigure gender equality-economy relations – and it should aim to do so.
Based on our research, we see more of this potential to actualise in policymaking discourses and practices and less at the level of ideas and understandings. We have also seen that civil society, including feminist researchers, play a crucial role in actualising this potential. Overall, we stress the importance of social reproduction for transforming gender equality-economy relations. In many struggles around these relationships, at least in Finland, social reproduction and its relationship to the productive economy has been left in the backseat, sometimes due to the institutional constraints of shifting public governance, sometimes due to political priorities.
Moving the boundaries of the economy to consider the value, role and costs of social reproduction is an essential task for transformative gender equality policy and feminism more broadly. Therefore, economies and economic policies should have an important role in the gender equality policy agendas and in the agendas of feminist movements.
For more information, see the authors’ new book, Governing Gender Equality Policy: Pathways in a Changing Nordic Welfare State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: astudio / Shutterstock.com
