Beyond Gender Mainstreaming: A Responsibility Culture Framework for Gender-Transformative Change

Affiliation: University of Malaga, Spain

Abstract

Gender mainstreaming has become an established policy and institutional strategy for advancing gender equality across governance and organisational contexts. Yet persistent gender inequalities indicate that the formal adoption of equality principles, procedures and compliance mechanisms does not necessarily translate into transformative institutional practice. This implementation gap raises a fundamental question: under what cultural conditions do individuals and organisations assume and exercise responsibility for gender-transformative change?

This conceptual paper addresses this question by introducing the Responsibility Culture (RESC) framework as an analytical approach to understanding the relationship between responsibility, agency and institutional culture. Rather than treating responsibility primarily as an externally imposed, rule-based obligation, RESC conceptualises responsibility as a formed human capacity. Grounded in feminist theories of agency and situated ethics, and developed through an interdisciplinary conceptual synthesis of gender-mainstreaming scholarship and organisational theories of ethical culture, the framework identifies three interrelated dimensions of responsibility: reflexive responsibility, concerning awareness of one’s position within systems of power; agentic responsibility, concerning the ethical exercise of judgement under institutional constraints; and collective responsibility, concerning the ways responsibility is narrated, shared and legitimised within organisations and communities.

The conceptual analysis indicates that the implementation gap in gender mainstreaming cannot be understood solely as a deficit of rules, procedures or formal accountability. It also reflects the cultural conditions through which individuals interpret equality norms, exercise judgement and recognise their capacity to act. The RESC framework therefore shifts the analytical focus from whether gender-equality requirements are formally adopted to how responsibility for their implementation is culturally formed and exercised.

The paper concludes that gender-transformative change requires more than institutional compliance: it requires environments capable of fostering reflexivity, responsible agency and collectively legitimised responsibility. RESC consequently offers a framework for analysing why formal gender-equality commitments are translated unevenly into everyday practice and provides a conceptual basis for future empirical research on the cultural conditions enabling gender-transformative change.

Keywords: Responsibility Culture; gender mainstreaming; gender-transformative change; feminist agency; institutional culture; reflexive judgement

Conference Themes: Gender-Transformative Frameworks and Feminist Theory; Law, Policy, and Institutional Change