Paper proposal: Failing State Feminism
Hege Skjeie, Cathrine Holst, Mari Teigen
The proposed paper will discuss the fate of knowledge based gender+ policy development, with examples drawn from a recent (2010-2012) governmental expert commission in Norway, where we all participated. The theoretical and empirical work of this commission was supplemented by three practical attempts to strengthen gender + perspectives in actual public policy:
A. A proposal to strengthen the protection against intersectional discrimination through the provision of explicit legal bans. This was accompanied by a demand for a reform of the low threshold system of law supervision (ombud and tribunal), so that actual sanctions can be located at this level.
B. A proposal to develop competence to actually implement gender+ mainstreaming by building a national bureaucratic structure in charge of mainstreaming equality (all protected strands) within state and municipal sectors.
C. A proposal to implement the positive duties of employers to promote equality in the work place. These activity duties follow from the equality legislation, but are not enforced. The commission suggested a new tripartite cooperation scheme, i.e between the government and labor/employer organisations.
The commission’s report has been hailed across decision making elites and civil society groups for its thoroughness in providing a new knowledge platform for gender+ policy making. But very little actual policy making has so far followed. We interpret the policy process as a case of failing state feminism. Why is this so?
Three major themes will be adressed:
• the ambivalent role of expertise in “state feminist” policy agency;
• the administration overload attached to equality policy’s main tool; i.e. “mainstreaming”,
• the threat that “judicialisation” discourses may pose to the promotion of effective protection against discrimination
In particular, we are interested in how these very different ideas/discourses might interwine to prevent fact based development of gender + public policy.
