Care policies in practice: how discourse matters for policy implementation

Abstract

This article puts public policy research in dialogue with gender and politics studies to enhance our understanding of the implementation of care policies. Care policies present interesting problems of implementation because of the multiplicity of aims, values, inequalities, actors and levels of governance involved. Nonetheless, previous research shows two important gaps: 1) the neglect of discursive factors in studies of implementation; and 2) the lack of attention to implementation processes in the analysis of care policies. This article suggests a general framework to address these issues which considers discourse as a transversal factor connecting actors and institutions engaged in policy implementation. The articles in this special issue demonstrate that including discourses in the analysis of care policy implementation makes visible the influence of gender+ norms and the dynamic and contentious processes surrounding them in a variety of institutional arenas, levels, and national contexts.

What do the narratives tell us? Exploring the implementation of the Athena SWAN Ireland Charter

“…Henderson and Bhopal (2021) study of the narratives of academic staff involved in the Athena SWAN and Race Equality Charters in the UK is illustrative of the role institutional actors play as policy translators, in embedding Charter marks in the higher education sector. The ways in which the key institutional actors tasked with embedding the Charter understand, perceive, and reconstruct the process as a whole are important, resonating with Ciccia and Lombardo's (2019) study on the transversal role of discourse and narratives in policy formulation. Legesen and Suboticki's study (2021) of academic department heads negotiating the contested pathway of enacting gender balance policies and Mannell (2014) study of narratives in framing gender as a policy issue, illustrate the ways in which narrative accounts highlight the role played by key actors' perceptions and interpretations in the implementation of policy recommendations, by undermining or facilitating the process.…”

The practice of ideas in gender equality policy: comparative lessons from the field

“…The GEPP approach -first elaborated by Engeli and Mazur (2018) and then applied by researchers in national case analyses that comparatively studied care policies (Ciccia and Lombardo, 2019), political representation (Lange et al, 2023), corporate gender equality (Engeli and Mazur, 2022) and five different policy sectors in France (Mazur and Engeli, 2020) -provides a roadmap for researchers to study the micro-politics of post-adoption. As the GEPP framework presented in Figure 1 indicates, the actual tools that are used by implementation actors that come out of a given formal policy decision produced in the pre-adoption and adoption stages tend to be a mix of instruments, and the 'practice' of policy implementation and evaluation (Montoya, 2013) is what is actually done.…”

Challenging boundaries to expand frontiers in gender and policy studies

“…Implementation is understood by some as a battleground of gender norms in which discursive political struggles are played out by actors with different interpretations of the policies to be put in practice (Ciccia and Lombardo 2019;Cavaghan 2017). An example of power as domination is when actors (such as civil servants unwilling to apply gender mainstreaming) resist the implementation of gender equality policies to maintain the status quo (Benschop and Verloo 2011).…”