No abstract

No abstract

The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record.

This article presents a new methodology, Gender Knowledge Contestation Analysis, and uses it to examine the processes under way when transformative gender equality policies, such as gender mainstreaming are implemented. Drawing on data gathered in the European Commission, the findings show the processes linking high-level rhetorical policy statements, strategic policies, and daily working practices. This analysis enables exploration of the mechanisms through which indifference to and nonawareness of gendered policy problems are collectively constituted and methods through which they can be challenged. Findings thus deepen our understanding of barriers to the implementation of gender mainstreaming and the steps required for its effective implementation.

This article provides new perspectives on the persistent hierarchy between 'social' and 'economic' goals in European Union's (EU) economic governance. We operationalize insights from feminist economics and political economy to analyse the agenda-setting documents of the European Semesterthe Annual Growth Surveys (AGS)showing how the much-debated integration of social goals into the European Semester is fundamentally constrained by mainstream economic epistemologies. These epistemologies misrepresent interrelationships between the productive economy and the reproductive labour needed to maintain it. Using interpretive policy analysis, we show how multiple concepts and measurements used to conceptualize policy goals and impacts within the AGSs, coalesce to systematically misrepresent reproductive labour as a 'social' activity, an irrelevance, or a cost, rather than a macroeconomic input. This restricts the possibilities of enhancing the social dimension of the European Semester, in ways conspicuously ignored by the existing literature, which are of heightened salience in the wake of Covid-19.