Evidence-Based Policy and Feminist Knowledge

This chapter examines the entanglements of gender equality policy and economic policy and struggles around gender equality–economy relations from the perspective of feminist knowledge producers. These include researchers, experts and civil society organisations. More specifically, the chapter analyses knowledge-based feminist strategies and interventions in the field of economic policies. In doing so, it analyses the effects of evidence-based policy on feminist strategies and actors. The interest in knowledge as a basis for policy-making has grown tremendously since the 1990s. This interest has led to a surge of approaches and methods seeking to provide a particular kind of governance-friendly, quantified, seemingly neutral and objective knowledge for policy-making. Feminist and gender equality policy actors have been quick to exploit the emphasis on evidence-based policy, supporting their claims with knowledge and developing knowledge-based strategies for promoting gender equality. By focusing on knowledge-based feminist strategies and interventions around economic policy, the chapter highlights the role of knowledge in reshaping gender equality–economy relations and how these relations have reshaped feminist knowledge. It also shows how privileging mainstream economics in evidence-based policy narrowed down possibilities for feminists to make knowledge-based claims and for politics to comprehend gendered economic inequalities.