Gender equality: a core dimension in Rural Development Programmes in Austria?

The supranational gender equality regime of the European Union (EU), in place since the 1990s, affects gender-related social policy including the so-called ‘gender-neutral’ policy fields such as the common agricultural policy and rural development policy. Especially, the implementation of gender equality in all policy fields through the strategy of gender mainstreaming in EU Structural Funds and Rural Development Programmes has become a key challenge for political and administrative players and stakeholders. Analysis reveals that the existing institutional, political and social barriers for an effective implementation of gender equality in rural development policy are manifold. Instead of promoting rural women's agency and empowerment, Rural Development Programmes and processes in Austria are preserving and perpetuating traditional gender roles and patriarchal structures in rural society.     

Global policy paradigms,gender equality and everyday lives in Beijing,Hong Kong,Seoul and Taipei

Focusing on the interface between gender equality, the labour market, and everyday lives in four East Asian societies – China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan – this article seeks to articulate the spatial expression and multi-scalarity of global governance and policy paradigms. It will demonstrate that whilst regions, places and people are influenced by global processes and paradigms, these move and embed in different ways across spaces, time and scales. In this context, the article seeks to develop a more nuanced appreciation of ‘the social lives’ of global policy models, engaging with the role of ideas and institutions and the interactions of transnational, national and local dynamics in the shaping of gender equality policies and everyday experiences. Drawing on qualitative data collected in Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul and Taipei the article draws out the perceptions of individuals from different policy, sectoral, social and cultural settings of gender equality. It highlights the tensions and disjunctures between general principles and particular situations, and in embedding gender equality policies into the social imaginaries and everyday lives of women and men. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing the role of place and power relations in shaping localized responses to and experiences of gender justice.     

Revisionism Reconsidered: 'Property-owning Democracy' and Egalitarian Strategy in Post-War Britain

Revisionist socialists of the 1950s and 1960s are typicallydepicted as advocates of the ‘Keynesian welfare state’route to economic equality. This article argues that this isan oversimplification: while the revisionists supported thewelfare state, they also aimed to promote equality by redistributingprivate property and expanding social ownership, endorsing anegalitarian version of a ‘property-owning democracy’.The article first discusses the political ideals and calculationsthat motivated the revisionists’ interest in this modelof egalitarian strategy and then examines in turn the threemutually reinforcing strands of policy that this goal generated:greater progressive taxation of wealth; measures to diffuseprivate property ownership and access to marketable skills;and the expansion of novel forms of social ownership.     

The autonomous world reversed: comparing liberal policy and autonomy in the performing arts

Comparative studies of cultural policy commonly emphasize the way in which states treat the autonomy of the arts. Such studies often claim that liberal states promote autonomy, while social democratic states promote more external, instrumental values, such as solidarity, universalism and equality. This article challenges this conception by claiming that in actual cultural policy-making it is in fact the other way around. Based on a comparative study of theater policy in England, Norway and the Netherlands, I find that the focus on artistic autonomy is surprisingly absent in the liberal state of England, compared to what it is in the social democratic state of Norway. Conversely, English theaters are more obliged to work for, and with, the citizens and the community than theaters in Norway are. In the Netherlands, where recent development in general policy has headed in a liberal direction, artistic autonomy actually appears to be increasingly challenged.     

The Riksdag,the state bureaucracy and the administration of hospitals in eighteenth‐century Sweden

Traditionally, the Norwegian modernization process has been presented as a success story that focuses on how social movements and democratized political institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries laid the foundations for a society and culture with an emphasis on social equality. The paper offers an alternative analysis of this process, based not on the issue of material equality and inequality, but on the concepts of normality and deviance. A comparison of the development of the Norwegian national education policy since the middle of the 19th century with the Danish and Swedish experiences involves the exclusion of the dissimilar as a distinct feature of the Norwegian policy. ‘Disability’ was constructed as a category of deviance by public policies and administrative and professional practice. The professions – particularly teachers and doctors – were important actors who offered alternative conceptions of normality and disability. However, the constructions that they selected were those that were in closest dialogue with the particular challenges confronted by the Norwegian modernisation process: first the liberal, then the social democratic construction. Because the national conditions confronting the Scandinavian modernization processes differed from each other, so did the related constructions of disability.     

Gender Equality Policies in Rwanda: Public Relations or Real Transformations?

This article examines Rwanda's gender equality policies with the intention of contributing to the ongoing debate in the literature on the meaning of gender equality initiatives in authoritarian states. The article evaluates the transformative potential of Rwanda's gender equality policies with reference to deep‐rooted societal norms and practices within which gender inequalities are embedded. To this end, the article draws on in‐depth interviews conducted in Rwanda with a range of stakeholders, as well as on documentary research. It explores the factors informing the Rwandan commitment to gender equality, and the positive developments this has brought about, before identifying five trends that threaten the transformative potential of Rwandan gender equality policies. The authors conclude that while a strong political will and target‐driven policies offer opportunities for promoting gender equality, the transformative potential is jeopardized by the dominance of an underlying economic rationale; the neglect of the ‘invisible labour’ of women; the formalistic implementation of gender policies and their focus on quantitative results; the limited scope for civil society voices to influence policy; and the lack of grassroots participation.     

All things go in pairs,or the sharks will bite: the antithetical nature of Fijian chiefship

Via an historical-cum-ethnographic analysis of the history of chiefship in the vanua (country) of Sawaieke, central Fiji, this essay argues against the prevailing view that Fijian social relations are fundamentally hierarchical. Rather social relations in general and chiefship in particular are predicated on complementary and opposing concepts of equality and hierarchy, such that neither can become, in Dumont's terms, ‘an encompassing value’. This radical opposition between equality and hierarchy, Hegelian in form, is fundamental to Fijian dualism, so it pervades Fijian daily life and informs, for example, sexual relations, kinship, chiefship and notions of the person. ‘The household’ is the basic kinship unit and while relations within households are hierarchical, relations across households are those of balanced reciprocal exchange, epitomised in the relation between cross-cousins as equals and affines. The analysis shows that Fijian chiefship — past or present — cannot, as ‘value’, encompass the pervasive antithesis between hierarchy and equality. Rather its efficacy and its continuity require that hierarchy and equality remain in tension with one another as opposing, and equally important, concepts of social relations.     

The good, the bad and the confusing: the political economy of social care expansion in South Korea

Recent social policy reforms in South Korea indicate a progressive shift by a conservative government to modify the familialistic male breadwinner model that informs its welfare regime. The Korean government has demonstrated support for women through an increase in the provision, regulation and coordination of childcare and workplace support programmes for working parents. At the same time, labour market reforms have also created more pressures on women to seek and maintain paid work outside the home. Conflicting social and economic policy objectives have resulted in a confusing mix of policies, advancing and impeding gender equality at the same time. This contribution examines the recent family–work reconciliation policy reforms in Korea and discusses why these reforms may be good politics but a bad deal for women.     

Engendering New Labour's Workfarist Regime: Exploring the intersection of welfare state restructuring and labour market policies in the UK

This article deconstructs New Labour's emerging workfarist regime to reveal the complex and contradictory gender relations embodied in and through its work–welfare policy. Starting from the decline of manufacturing employment within the UK, it traces the deregulation of the labour market and the range of structural and social changes initiated by this process. Noting, in particular, how the ‘feminisation of the economy’ is connected to the changing characteristics of employment and women's socio-economic positions, the article identifies the manner in which the growing labour market participation of women is serving to (further) entrench gender inequality. Against this background, it proceeds to raise issues regarding the increased expectation to enter the labour market observed within programmes such as the New Deal for the Unemployed, which stipulates that the receipt of state benefits ought now to require a labour input. The crux of analysis is on the policy and political discourses that award priority to paid work in the formal labour market, whilst simultaneously neglecting the gendered divisions of labour around unwaged care work and domestic tasks. In suggesting that gender remains a key form of political-economic organisation in the contemporary period of after-Fordism, this article argues that (further) attention must be given to the ways in which its socially constructed properties are manifest within work–welfare policy and the ramifications of this embedding for social and economic equality.     

‘Gender hates men’: untangling gender and development discourses in food security fieldwork in urban Malawi

This article examines the social construction and contestation of gender and gender roles in the city of Blantyre in Malawi. In fieldwork on gendered household roles related to food security, interviews with men and women revealed a distinct set of connotations with the word gender, which reflected Malawians’ historical and contemporary engagement with concepts of development, modernity, and human rights. We denote the Malawian concept of gender as gender in order to distinguish the word participants used in interviews from the more widely accepted conventional definition. We then use this distinction to highlight the ways in which ideas of gender equality have been introduced and received in the Malawian context. The urban setting of the research is key to drawing out the association of gender with Westernization, bringing into focus the power dynamics inherent in the project of translating global discourses of gender rights and gender equality into meaningful social change in developing countries. Gender in Malawi denotes a top-down (and outside-in) process of framing Malawi’s goals for gender equality. This creates political constraints both in the form of resistance to gender, because it resonates with a long history of social change imposed by outside forces, and in the form of superficial adherence to gender to appear more urban and modern, especially to a Western researcher. Local understandings of gender as gender undermine efforts to promote gender equality as a means to address Malawi’s intense urban poverty and household food insecurity.     

Feminist Mobilization,Claims Making and Policy Change: An Introduction

More than two decades after the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, gender equality policies have not delivered in the ways envisaged. This special cluster of articles seeks to understand why. Women's mobilization and feminist activism was central to the Beijing process and the advocacy that followed, yet their influence on policy processes seems constrained in the current context of global political and economic changes. The articles in this cluster explore the negotiations between different actors, institutions and discourses — and the tensions and contradictions therein — as explanations for why certain domains of women's rights remain at the margins of political agendas and others receive more attention. Specifically, why have women's labour rights and the demands of the unpaid care economy failed to gain policy traction? The articles point to the importance of political practice, which includes the ‘framing’ of policy demands as compelling narratives, engagement with state entities and the forming and managing of alliances. There are trade‐offs inherent in each of these elements, for example, between transformative gender equality objectives and the pragmatic impulse to frame claims in less politically and socially threatening ways. Further, in a context of increasing globalization, mobilization is required at multiple levels — from the local to the transnational. The articles thus seek to deepen our understanding of how policy change for women's rights occurs.     

Effecting Equality: Norwegian Health Policy in Finnmark, 1945–1970s

Abstract

At the heart of “the Nordic model of welfare” is a strong will for national integration and social equality between citizens and regions. It is commonly held that that “homogeneity ethnic” is one explanatory factor behind the Nordic model of welfare. On the contrary, we claim that it is the political will to treat the population as homogeneous that influenced the creation of the model, not any factual ethnic homogeneity (which is, after all, a historical fiction, also in the Nordic context). Thus, the pursuit of integration and the strive for regional equality have challenged local autonomy and cultural diversity while at the same time underpinned arguments for a regionalization of politics and, to some extent, for ethnic particularization. Drawn between a strong state and local authority, universalism and particularization, welfare and health policies have reshaped the relationship between center and peripheries and between the majority and ethnic minorities.

The integration of the county of Finnmark into the national system of institutionalized welfare in Norway after World War II constitutes a good case to investigate not only the will, but also the ability, for national integration and equalization along the dimensions of centre–periphery and majority–minority relations, not only because of the county's position furthest to the north, but also because it held the largest minority populations. This article examines Norwegian policies to establish and effect equality between Finnmark and other regions in the field of health care facilities from 1945 until the 1970s, and the attempts to establish equal access to health services between the Sámi minority and the Norwegian majority population in Finnmark. It sheds light upon how the immanent conflict between the ideals of a national, universal welfare policy and particular measures in favor of the Sámi was conceived in the period. (The authors expected multi-culturality to be clearly visible in the sources. It was, but only with regard to one minority group, the Sámi. The Kvens were not discussed by the policy-makers in the period.) Furthermore, it has been argued that in the shaping and implementation of Norwegian health policies in the first years after World War II, primacy was given to expert knowledge. A particular point of interest in this article is how this primacy manifested itself in the choices of political strategies of universalism and particularism within the field of health policy in this particular geographical setting.     

Christian Marriage,Money Scams,and Melanesian Social Imaginaries

In this paper, we draw on fieldwork with middle‐class investors in ‘fast money schemes’ (Ponzi scams) to consider how Neo‐Pentecostal Christianity may be mediating social and economic change in Papua New Guinea, particularly in relation to gender equality. Ideas of companionate marriage and the cultivation of an affective self imply masculinities that are more sensitive and less domineering. As these images of fulfilled modernity flow out from Pentecostal churches into broader Papua New Guinean society, they corroborate Taylor's theory of how change occurs within the modern social imaginary.     

Mark Latham and the ideology of the ALP

This article focuses on Mark Latham's views on equality. Latham's emphasis on education and on overcoming suburban, spatial inequality draws on the Whitlamite tradition. However, his work also draws on neoliberal influences and on arguments regarding the impact of the information economy. Both these influences have contributed to a move away from more traditional Labor and social‐democratic views on class, racial and gender inequality. This article considers Latham's relationship with traditional Labor ideology as well as with Third Way politics. Latham's arguments regarding the role of elites and the implications that this has for his understandings of the city, capitalism and diverse forms of inequality are also addressed. Latham's earlier views still influence his speeches and electoral strategy as Labor Leader.     

Neoliberalism and gender equality policy in Australia

After a Coalition electoral victory in 2013, the Australian Office for Women was returned from the periphery to the centre of government. This was contrary to the expectation that women’s policy will be given greater salience under governments of the left rather than of the right. To unpack this puzzle, we examine institutional arrangements and policy directions under successive Labor and Coalition governments in Australia, including the abolition of intergovernmental bodies concerned with gender equality. We find that the influence of neoliberalism has resulted in a blurring of patterns of partisan difference over gender equality policy. There are some continuing partisan differences but also a common pattern of increased emphasis on international and regional rather than domestic policy. The notable exception to this pattern is in the area of gender-based violence.     

20世纪90年代社会学视野下我国社会政策和社会问题研究中的社会性别分析述评

妇女解放和男女平等的追求一直是人类社会一个永恒主题。文章通过对 2 0世纪 90年代这 1 0年里我国社会学界在社会政策和社会问题研究中所反映出来的社会性别意识和观念进行概括 ,总结出他们在研究中所表现出来的一些特点 ,并详细地分析了这些研究中存在的三种情况 ,即对社会性别的忽略或笼统化、一定的社会性别歧视、合理的社会性别分析描述和以抨击偏见维护两性平等。通过综合述评 ,旨在引起我国政界和学界在今后社会政策制定和社会问题研究中对性别问题的高度注意 ,最终促进人类社会的良性协调发展     

Schools and Attitudes Toward Economic Equality

Do policies that shape equality in schools have effects on the type of society and polity that the citizens educated in them want? This paper examines this question by analyzing variation in the English schooling experiences using the British Cohort Study and British Panel Study. It shows that the social environment of schooling affects adults’ attitudes to fairness and Conservative vote choice, but that policies targeting these social environments have weak effects. The paper theorizes that actual policy feedback in education is often limited, because the effects of policies on school experiences are mediated by the behaviors of other actors on the ground.     

Australian Federalism and Domestic Violence Policy-Making

The influence of state architecture on gender policy and politics is an emergent strand of feminist research. This paper contributes to this research by undertaking a detailed case study of one specific gender policy area – domestic violence policy – in old federation Australia. Drawing on the experiences of the past decade, it confirms earlier research findings that demonstrate that under certain conditions, federal structures can influence the development of gender policy in positive ways, such as providing opportunities for ‘venue shopping’ and policy innovation. The paper engages, too, with recent research on Australian federalism and challenges the consensus about the centralised nature of the Australian federal system by demonstrating that in the area of gender policy, states and territories are more than just the implementation arms of the Commonwealth government. Sub-national governments continue to play an important and autonomous role in policy relating to women and therefore remain central sites for advancing gender equality.     

Liberal,Liminal and Lost: India’s First Diplomats and the Narrative of Foreign Policy

Indian historiography has largely overlooked the contribution of Indian Liberals in the pre-independence era. It is worse in Indian diplomatic history where studies on pre-independence are few and far between. Responding to this double excision, this article traces the emergence of a new Indian narrative of foreign policy around the issues of equality and justice in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Anchoring their argumentativeness in diplomatic finesse, Indian Liberals such as Satyendra Prasanno Sinha, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri and Tej Bahadur Sapru relentlessly campaigned for racial equality and predominance of the rights of people over the rights of states at the Imperial Conferences. In the articulation of these views, South Africa, a country where ideas about the status of Indians and Indian civilisation were most contested, emerged as the singular foreign policy ‘other’ around which India’s foreign policy narrative was constructed.