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Gender equality is firmly established on the European Union development policy agenda. However, a series of interrelated crises, including migration, security and climate change, are becoming more prominent in European Union development policy. This article asks whether development objectives have been subsumed under these crisis-driven European Union priorities, whether this is compatible with efforts to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment through development cooperation and whether it will affect the ability to keep gender equality high on the European Union’s development policy agenda. The theoretical framework draws on horizontal policy coordination and nexuses. The analysis of European Union development policy documents shows how migration, security and climate change are constructed as crises, how they intersect in various nexuses and how gender intersects with each of these nexuses. This research finds that gender equality is absent from the migration–security–climate nexuses, which are increasingly driving development policy priorities. The article argues that it is quite straightforward to keep gender equality on the development policy agenda, but it is difficult to retain a focus on gender equality when multiple policy areas intersect. The research suggests that the discourse of crisis has blocked the way, and this will have an impact on the European Union’s internal and external activities.

In November 2019 the European Parliament (2019/2930(RSP)) declared a climate and environmental emergency, calling for urgent and concrete action. The year 2019 was Europe's hottest year on record (Copernicus Climate Change Service, 2019), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2018, p. v) reported that 'emissions of greenhouse gases due to human activities, the root cause of global warming, continue to increase, year after year'. Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg inspired and led a worldwide school strike movement, and mass protests dominated by young women took place around the world (Wahlström et al., 2019). The European Parliament resolution of 14 March 2019 (2019/2582(RSP)) 'welcomes the fact that people across Europe, in particular younger generations, are becoming increasingly active in demonstrating for climate justice'. At the institutional level 2019 was a year of renewal, with the European Parliament elections in May, the adoption of a new Council strategy in June and the appointment of a new Commission in December. Climate change was a priority for all these institutional actors. The Council strategy 2019-24, for example, insists on the urgent need to build a 'climate-neutral, green, fair and social Europe'. The new President of the Commission Ursula von der Leyen announced her intention to see Europe become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. Climate change arrived on the EU agenda in the 1980s, emerging out of environmental policy, which was already established as an area that required transnational action. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s the climate ambition of the EU exceeded its ability to agree on, and implement, effective actions (Dupont and Oberthür, 2015). When the USA withdrew from the Kyoto protocol in 2001 the EU took on a global leadership role and has continued to construct an identity as a global actor around the issue of climate change (Jordan et al., 2010). This had economic motivations (to avoid being undercut by exporters with lower environmental standards) but was also part of the post-Maastricht efforts to increase the EU's global actorness. The past decade has seen climate change gain prominence and take centre stage. In 2009 the landmark climate and energy framework (COM(2014)15 final) introduced targets for greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency and renewable energy. Within the European Commission climate action gained its own Directorate General, DG CLIMA. This was an important part of the process of institutionalizing climate change. The issue of climate change continued to rise up the EU and the global agenda, and there was a strong dynamic between the two. The Lisbon Treaty (2007) gave the EU competence to conclude international environmental agreements. The EU, along with its member states, is a party to the United Nations

This very well-informed book sets its detailed case studies within a wider context and brings together empirical accounts with explanations of underlying ideas and approaches. Refreshingly clearly written, it will be invaluable for those interested in comparative politics and public policy as well as in women's studies.'-Anne Stevens, Emeritus Professor of European Studies, Aston University, UK Parliaments made up of more than 80 per cent men have, since 2000, passed laws on contraception, abortion and domestic violence. Men have decided whether girls can wear the Islamic headscarf to school, whether prostitutes should be criminalized rather than their clients, and whether the number of women involved in making these decisions should be increased. The relation between gender and policy is far more complex than whether or not women participate in decision making. Taking as a premise that all public policies are gendered, this book considers selected policy issues which illustrate aspects of the relationship between feminism, gender and policy; a relationship which is increasingly recognised as complex, dynamic and variable. The complexity is best amplified, for example, when attention is focused on intersections of race and gender, class and gender, or both, in policy debates and decision making, raising questions about meanings of universalism, equal rights and citizenship.