Gender mainstreaming and EU climate change policy

This article uses feminist institutionalism to examine how gender mainstreaming has been sidelined in European Union (EU) climate change policy. It finds that, with a few exceptions largely emanating from the European Parliament's Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality, EU responses to climate change are gender-blind. This is despite the Treaty obligations to gender mainstream policy in all areas and despite the intersections between climate change and development policy, which is renowned for having taken gender equality and women's empowerment seriously and for instigating gender mainstreaming and specific actions as a means to achieve them. The persistent invisibility of gender can be attributed to various forms of institutional resistance

Increasing women's representation in France and India

Cet article présente la question de la représentation politique des femmes en France et en Inde. Tout d’abord, il vise à mettre en évidence comment la représentation des femmes était inscrite à l’agenda politique de chaque pays. Ensuite, il propose un examen critique des arguments utilisés pour justifier la demande d’une meilleure représentation ainsi que de ceux pour s’y opposer. Enfin, il considère les conclusions que l’on peut tirer de ces deux cas. Dépassant les cadres comparatifs traditionnels utilisés par les féministes occidentales et en contestant l’insistance française sur l'idée d'une France unique, cet article identifie les particularismes et les points communs de chaque cas, pour tenter d’atteindre à ce que Shirin Rai appelle “un dépassement enraciné des frontières culturelles, historiques et politiques.” (Rai, 2000: 15)

Agenda setting, agenda blocking and policy silence: why is there no EU policy on prostitution?

The EU has expanded its policy remit into all kinds of areas, and has made a clear commitment to gender equality. However, issues such as prostitution, abortion and same-sex families, which many would argue are closely linked to gender equality, have remained absent from the EU policy agenda. This article takes the case of prostitution, and asks how we explain the EU’s policy silence on this issue, despite its clear action on the closely related issue of trafficking in human beings (the 2011 Anti-Trafficking Directive (European Parliament & The Council, 2011); the appointment of an Anti-Trafficking Coordinator; and the Strategy towards the Eradication of Trafficking in Human Beings (2012-2016) (European Commission, 2012)). Using a combination of process tracing and document analysis, it examines how prostitution has been kept off the policy agenda; how it has been framed as a policy issue; which actors have been able to define the issue, and which have been excluded. The article contributes to a broader understanding of why some issues become defined as problems requiring public policy responses and others do not; how they appear on, or are excluded from, the policy agenda at the member state and EU level; and how issues, frames and proposals are ignored or actively silenced within policymaking structures and processes

La violence à l’égard des femmes fondée sur le genre dans la France contemporaine: bilan de la politique relative aux violences conjugales et aux mariages forcés depuis la Convention d’Istanbul

In 2014, France ratified the Council of Europe’s Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (the Istanbul Convention) and passed the Law for Equality between Women and Men to bring French law into line with it. The Law for Equality between Women and Men situates the fight against violence against women within a broader context of the need to address inequalities between women and men. This is not new at the international level, but it is new to France. When the structural, transformative understandings of violence against women found in international texts are translated into national laws, policy documents and implementation on the ground, they might challenge widespread ideas about gender relations, or they might be diluted in order to achieve consensus. To what extent has French violence against women policy moved into line with United Nations (UN) and Council of Europe initiatives which present violence against women as both a cause and a consequence of gendered power relations? Have internationally accepted concepts of gender and gender-based violence been incorporated into French policy debates and, if so, how? What implications, if any, does all this have for the continued struggle in France and elsewhere to eliminate violence against women? Résumé En 2014, la France ratifie la Convention du Conseil de l’Europe sur la prévention et la lutte contre la violence à l’égard des femmes et la violence domestique (dite Convention d’Istanbul) et adopte dans la foulée la loi pour l’égalité réelle entre les femmes et les hommes afin de mettre en conformité la législation française. Cette loi place la lutte contre les violences faites aux femmes dans un contexte de lutte contre les inégalités de genre. Si cela est loin d’être une nouveauté à l’échelle internationale, cela l’est en France. Lorsque les conceptions structurelles et transformatrices des violences faites aux femmes présentes dans les textes internationaux sont traduites à l’échelle nationale en lois, documents d’orientation et mesures de mise en œuvre sur le terrain, elles peuvent alors remettre en question des idées largement répandues sur les rapports de genre, ou au contraire être édulcorées afin d’aboutir à un consensus. Dans quelle mesure la politique de la France relative aux violences faites aux femmes s’est-elle alignée sur les initiatives de l’ONU et du Conseil de l’Europe qui présentent ce type de violences comme étant à la fois une cause et une conséquence des rapports de force liés au genre ? Le genre et la violence fondée sur le genre, qui sont des concepts internationalement reconnus, ont-ils été intégrés dans les débats politiques français, et si oui, de quelle manière ? Quelles en sont les implications le cas échéant sur la poursuite, en France et ailleurs, de la lutte pour éliminer les violences faites aux femmes 

Gender and politics in modern and contemporary France

This chapter examines the theme of gender in modern and contemporary French politics. The chapter traces the development of the role of women in the French political sphere since 1944, including the parity laws designed to ensure that 50% of all political candidates at all electoral levels in France are women. The chapter argues that whilst there have been inroads in greater gender parity in legislative elections for the National Assembly, other elections, especially on a local level, have not witnessed this same parity. Indeed, the chapter demonstrates that although women are better represented on electoral bodies in France today than in the recent past, parity has above all favoured women from the same socio-economic elite as male politicians. The chapter argues that there is still some way to go to enabling the French political sphere to reflect the wider diversity of the French population

Gender equality in European Union development policy in times of crisis

Gender equality is firmly established on the EU development policy agenda. However, a series of inter-related crises, including migration, security and climate change, are becoming more prominent in EU development policy. This article asks whether development objectives have been subsumed under these crisis-driven EU priorities; whether this is compatible with efforts to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment through development cooperation; and whether it will affect the ability to keep gender equality high on the EU’s development policy agenda. The theoretical framework draws on horizontal policy coordination and nexuses. The analysis of EU development policy documents shows how migration, security and climate change are constructed as crises; how they intersect in various nexuses; and how gender intersects with each of these nexuses. This research finds that gender equality is absent from the migration-security-climate nexuses, which are increasingly driving development policy priorities. The article argues that it is quite straightforward to keep gender equality on the development policy agenda, but it is difficult retain a focus on gender equality when multiple policy areas intersect. The research suggests that the discourse of crisis has blocked the way, and this will have an impact on the EU’s internal and external activities

EU external climate policy

Climate change is a key priority for European Union external action, and the EU is an important global climate actor. The EU is also committed to mainstreaming the goal of gender equality throughout all of its internal and external activities. However, EU external climate policy remains largely gender blind. This chapter draws on feminist institutionalism and on the literature on policy integration, including gender mainstreaming, to show how and why gender is excluded from EU external climate policy. It asks, firstly, where, in external climate policy, do we find references to gender and what, if anything, do they contribute to achieving gender-just climate policy. Secondly, it asks how feminist institutionalism and policy integration studies can help us understand why gender equality is not mainstreamed in EU external policy and what institutional obstacles prevent its integration. It argues that gender has been excluded from EU external climate policy by a combination of institutional power struggles; a discourse of crisis and security, which pushes gender into the background; and a proliferation of nexuses and mainstreaming imperatives in which the Treaty obligation to mainstream gender is pushed to one side