Much has been written about the way in which the EU ‘defines the normal in international politics’ and exports its norms, including gender equality norms, as exemplified by the label of Normative Power Europe. However, in the domain of trade policies, which are known to have gendered effects, the EU has not acted as an exporter of gender equality concerns. This is all the more striking as the EU formally committed itself to gender mainstreaming in all its policies, which implicitly includes trade agreements, when it signed the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997. In contrast, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), without any claim to fame as a norm promoter, has embedded gender concerns in its trade policies. Given unequal power relations, trade negotiations between SADC and the EU seem to undermine gender equality in SADC instead of supporting it. This paper argues that the underlying logics of regional governance differ between EU and SADC, and hinder the effective promotion of gender equality in EU trade policies, whereas they enable gender mainstreaming in SADC.
