Gender impact assessment has been both celebrated as a beacon of hope for the cause of gender equality and criticised as being ineffectual. More than 20 years of gender mainstreaming have demonstrated that equality governance with and through impact assessment is an intersectional and still evolving process. Arn T. Sauer's study examines the instruments of gendered policy analysis and the conditions under which they are being used by the Canadian federal government and the European Commission. Interviews with experts from public administration and instrument designers as well as document analyses reveal benefits and challenges and show that the success of equality governance depends upon whether knowledge about gendered policy and appropriate administrative practices are embedded, embodied and entrenched in public administration.

This book explores how climate institutions in industrialized countries work to further the recognition of social differences and integrate this understanding in climate policy making. With contributions from a range of expert scholars in the field, this volume investigates policy-making in climate institutions from the perspective of power as it relates to gender. It also considers other intersecting social factors at different levels of governance, from the global to the local level and extending into climate-relevant sectors. The authors argue that a focus on climate institutions is important since they not only develop strategies and policies, they also (re)produce power relations, promote specific norms and values, and distribute resources. The chapters throughout draw on examples from various institutions including national ministries, transport and waste management authorities, and local authorities, as well as the European Union and the UNFCCC regime. Overall, this book demonstrates how feminist institutionalist theory and intersectionality approaches can contribute to an increased understanding of power relations and social differences in climate policy-making and in climate-relevant sectors in industrialized states. In doing so, it highlights the challenges of path dependencies, but also reveals opportunities for advancing gender equality, equity, and social justice. Gender, Intersectionality and Climate Institutions in Industrialized States will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate politics, international relations, gender studies and policy studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003052821, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

In theory, the EU’s ‘Gender Mainstreaming’ policy should mark it out as a trail-blazer in gender equality, but gender equality activists in Europe confront a knotty problem; most civil servants and policy makers can’t understand how to ‘mainstream’ gender. Making Gender Equality Happen argues that we should take this problem seriously. In this book Cavaghan uncovers the social processes that make gender appear irrelevant to so many policy makers using a new method, gender knowledge contestation analysis. Building on this new perspective Cavaghan identifies: barriers to effective gender mainstreaming; mechanisms of resistance to gender mainstreaming; and the steps towards positive change, which gender mainstreaming can yield, even when results stop short of ‘transformation’. These findings present fresh perspectives for policy makers and activists aiming to make gender equality happen. Cavaghan’s new method also opens fresh avenues in feminist EU studies, which are particularly relevant in the wake of the financial crisis, as the EU seems to be stepping away from its commitments to gender equality.

The Palgrave Handbook of Gender, Sexuality, and Canadian Politics offers the first and only handbook in the field of Canadian politics that uses 'gender' (which it interprets broadly, as inclusive of sex, sexualities, and other intersecting identities) as its category of analysis. Its premise is that political actors’ identities frame how Canadian politics is thought, told, and done; in turn, Canadian politics, as a set of ideas, state institutions and decision-making processes, and civil society mobilizations, does and redoes gender. Following the standard structure of mainstream introductory Canadian politics textbooks, this handbook is divided into four sections (ideologies, institutions, civil society, and public policy) each of which contains several chapters on topics commonly taught in Canadian politics classes. The originality of the handbook lies in its approach: each chapter reviews the basics of a given topic from the perspective of gendered/sexualized and other intersectional identities. Such an approach makes the handbook the only one of its kind in Canadian Politics.

“A very valuable and much needed book on a central element in the processes of social change: the construction and reconstruction of social norms as they move between global and local levels.” —Naila Kabeer, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK “This book explores how gender equality norms are ever-evolving and argues convincingly that we cannot take their effectiveness, nor their acceptance, for granted.” —Judith Kelley, Duke Sanford School of Public Policy, USA “In an era of increasing resistance to gender equality, this is a much-needed volume that attends to how gender equality norms are interpreted and contested in governance organisations ranging from the UN and the EU to Mercosur and women’s NGOs in India and Uganda.” —Ann Towns, University of Gothenburg, Sweden This edited collection provides a new theoretical approach to the study of how global norms influence social processes. It analyses the institutional and highly political processes whereby actors – be they local, national, regional or trans-national – engage with global norms of gender equality. The editors bring together key thinkers who emphasise how context and history effect norm engagement and how particular groups and actors tend to be marginalised from discussions of global norms. By proposing a situated approach that underlines the contingent, multi-level processes that occur when actors interpret, use, manipulate, bend, or betray norms, notions of norm diffusion are fundamentally challenged. This book makes a further crucial contribution to the study of norms and gender equality in global governance by analysing very different empirical contexts, from New Delhi and St. Petersburg to the Organisation of American States, and from Kampala and New York to the European Union.