MethodologyConceptual frameworkThe starting point of the research was that gender equality is a dynamic, contested concept that takes on different meanings in different spatiotemporal contexts. The concept travels through space and time, crossing national as well as institutional borders. In this process, its meaning is stretched, shrunk and bent (Lombardo et al. 2009): “gender equality can be filled with a variety of meanings that arise from different political histories, contexts, struggles, and debates. That is, gender equality is a concept open to interpretation and contestation by different actors.” The study of such a concept and such processes of interpretation and contestation necessitate a discursive approach to politics and policy. The research was built around the concept of policy frames: an “organizing principle that transforms fragmentary or incidental information into a structured and meaningful problem, in which a solution is implicitly or explicitly included” (Verloo 2005: 20). During the course of the research we differentiated between issue frames (a relatively coherent reasoning in which issue specific prognostic elements respond to issue-specific diagnostic elements), document frames (the particular ways in which a document or an actor constructs the issue at hand by using one or more issue frames), and metaframes (which stretch over different policy issues and which are the generalised normative aspects of issue frames). The research thus endeavoured to analyse policy frames in gender+ equality policies by (1) collecting relevant documents, (2) identifying issue frames contained in them, (3) comparing different countries, actors and issues based on how the documents use these issue frames. Methodology step-by-step
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