Understanding Institutional Change from a Gender Perspective

Abstract

Many institutionalist scholars, and historical institutionalists in particular, have recognised for some time that our understanding of institutional change needs to be improved. Taking this premise as its starting point, this working paper develops it by arguing that we not only need to understand institutional change better but that we also need to improve our understanding of how it is gendered. The paper brings together key elements from institutional analysis with recent gender and politics scholarship, to form an analytical framework that can be used to examine how different instances of institutional change are gendered. After exploring the gaps in current analyses, the paper outlines some key insights from historical institutionalism (and particularly from Mahoney and Thelen?s 2010 framework) as well as feminist institutionalism, delineating some different forms of institutional change and developing some key themes for each one that might enable us to better understand not only how each is gendered, but also how far each form might be used by change actors as a gender equity strategy. The working paper ends with a plea for further research to discern the utility of these concepts and framework.

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