CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Vida, Bianka |
|---|---|
| Title | A failure of gender mainstreaming - Renegotiating gender equality norms in Horizon 2020 |
| Summary | The thesis provides the first policy frame analysis of gender equality norms in the work programmes of the latest EU’s Framework Programme for Research and Development, Horizon 2020, led by the European Commission (EC) from 2014 until 2016. It investigates the policy documents in a pioneering way by looking at the framing processes of gender equality norms in its dynamic and ongoing (re)negotiations at the three intersection of the local advisory experts’ constellations, the EU’s normative power and the EU gender equality policy agenda. By developing my own broad discursive methodology, I offer new insights on both institutional and individual resistance which is understudied in the scholarship since the 2000s (see Schimmelfenning 2000). Moreover, I provide creative research directions on the present policy analysis literature and methods. I employ a bottom-up approach to map the political agency of the local actors instead of solely focusing on high-ranking bureaucrats in the norm diffusion processes of gender equality in Horizon 2020 (see Mergaet and Lombardo 2014). Opposed to the EC’s excessive rhetorical commitment to gender equality and gender mainstreaming in research, I demonstrate that the work programmes of Horizon 2020 controversially represent as an example of a failure of accepting and fulfilling gender equality norms and particularly gender mainstreaming. That way on the one hand, I call into question Manners’s ‘normative power of Europe’ concept (2002) by challenging the EU’s normative identity as a human rights promoter and exporter for the common good. Instead, I show that the EU and specifically the EC is driven by its economic self-interest since its establishment that hinders from introducing ‘transformative’ frames of gender mainstreaming in Horizon 2020. On the other hand, I also give novel insights on the present gender mainstreaming literature. I urge feminist academics to approach gender mainstreaming at the intersection of both theory and policy practice so that gender mainstreaming can become as a policy tool for real social change in practice (see Brouwers 2013). Based on the above, I question the feminist economic policy scholarship arguing that the human rights-based notion of gender equality in the EU is subsumed to its neoliberal agenda (see Rönnblom 2009 and True 2009). By going further, I make a radical statement and claim that Horizon 2020 has recently made a paradigm shift which is introducing a normative change at the same time. I assert that this new normative change of the EU gender regime is consciously built on economising and thus, depoliticising gender equality norms in the EC’s neoliberal context. |
| Supervisor | Pető Andrea |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/vida_bianka.pdf |
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