Strategic Governance and the Shifting Form of Gender Equality Policy

This chapter discusses the depoliticising effects of managerial public governance on gender equality policy. It focuses on a recent and still understudied public governance trend, strategic governance, involving efforts to make policy-making processes more strategic by narrowing policy objectives. By analysing key Finnish gender equality policy documents—the Government Action Plans for Gender Equality—the chapter shows how the implementation of strategic governance in Finland has intensified the ongoing shifts in the position, scope and practices of gender equality policy while also opening new doors for implementing horizontal policy goals such as gender equality. Overall, the chapter argues that managerial shifts in public governance, such as the strategic reform implemented in Finland in 2015, have facilitated a shift from promoting gender equality towards management of gender equality policy, making it a technocratic, administrative exercise. The chapter argues further that strategic, managerial governance can facilitate a backlash of gender equality policy by giving conservative and right-wing populist parties new, subtle tools to weaken gender equality policy as well as legitimise the dismantling of gender equality policy.