For over 30 years, Sweden has had a political devotion of implementing gender mainstreaming. The implementation has targeted both the national and the local level of politics. Gender mainstreaming is the strategy for implementing national gender equality policy into all public arenas. This effort has resulted in a Swedish success story in international academic literature. This story is so established that it can be described as a grand narrative. However, the domestic story of gender mainstreaming efforts in Sweden is much more nuanced, and has several parallel versions to it. They range from stories of total implementation failure and of major political backlash. The domestic narration also includes ‘branding stories’ of local success as seen in the grand narrative. This paper explores the schism between the international success story on the one hand, and the domestic versions on the other. The comparison of stories is based on political statements, research and evaluations from Sweden, EU and the UN.
In this paper, a multi-layered approach is used to analyse the ‘travelling’ of stories such as the Swedish success story case. This approach makes it possible to follow how different narratives are being presented and reproduced.
What are the political implications of such a schism in stories? On one hand, the grand narrative poses a incomplete picture of what has been accomplished in Sweden since the difficulties imbedded in bringing about change are understated. From a normative point of view, however, there may be certain advantages with such narrative since the impression of a successful case ‘the good example’ can encourage others to follow, and to believe success to be possible.
