Looking Local: Sub-national Institutions and Policies on Violence Against Women

• In Event: Feminist Institutionalism at 10 years: New Perspectives on Transformative Change

Abstract

Feminist scholarship concerned with understanding the policy process addressing gender equality, such as policy reform directed at the problem of violence against women and girls (VAWG), has stressed the importance of the activities of feminist advocates in international, national and local women's movements, female representatives and ‘femocrats’ inside the state as crucial for ensuring policy change (Weldon, 2002; 2004; Htun and Weldon, 2012; McBride Stetson and Mazur, 1995; Banaszak, 2010; Holli, 2008). More recent research, drawing on feminist institutionalism, has argued for the need to appreciate the way in which institutions (understood as formal and informal rules-in-action) structure this advocacy and the processes of policy reform and change across a range of arenas (Mackay, Kenny and Chappell, 2010; Annesley and Gains, 2010; Chappell and Waylen, 2013). A focus on both actors and institutions, and the way in which actors operate in rule-bound settings, offers a deeper analysis of gender equality policy reform (and why it so often disappoints) whilst also suggesting more nuanced strategies to support sustainable policy change, reflecting the underlying commitments of feminist scholarship . A focus on both actors and institutions has been most recently coupled with insights from public policy analyses that demonstrate the heterogeneity of gender equality policy reforms across countries (Htun and Weldon, 2010; Annesley, Engeli and Gains, 2015). While feminist institutionalism has thrown light on the different trajectories of policy reform, the focus to date has been on actors and institutions at the national level. To understand the potential for ‘great transformations’ in gender equality, we argue for the need to ‘look local’ (Haussman, Sawyer and Vickers, 2010).
For status based policies, such as those addressing violence against women (VAWG), the advocacy of critical executive actors is key to getting issues on decision agendas; hence it is important to focus on the relevant decision making arena. We argue that actors and institutions at the sub-national level play a vital role in the enactment and implementation of VAWG policies. Understanding the impact of institutional arrangements at this level, and how they differentially constrain and empower actors, is central to explaining variation in policy outcomes. Such an analysis can also inform strategies for strengthening policy reforms to address VAWG. Drawing on insights from feminist institutionalism, this paper uses a framework for considering how gendered institutions and gendered actors are implicated in gender equality policy reform (Gains and Lowndes, 2014). We investigate how local police and crime commissioners (PCCs) in England and Wales responded to demands for policy action on VAWG, presenting qualitative and quantitative findings from a mixed methods research design over a three year period. We look at the interaction between the 41 elected commissioners and the new institutional arrangements for local policing governance introduced in 2012. Findings suggest that variability in the prioritisation of VAWG policies at sub national level is linked to actors’ own gender, but also to the ways in which they engage with elements of the institutional framework, notably gender equality duties, and are connected to interlinking and pre-existing institutional arrangements including political parties.

Authors

• Vivien Lowndes, University of Birmingham

• Francesca Gains, University of Manchester