Equality Diffusion or Isomorphism?: Alternative explanations for Intergovernmental Organization similarities as regulators and recipients of equality challenges

Equality struggles around human rights, race and gender frequently focus on an emerging set of international actors such as the EU and the UN. These organizations have been instrumental in promulgating policies to address primarily gender equality. Common stages of adaptation and similar approaches to promote equal opportunities between men and women can be identified at local, national and international level. The literature argues that the fora and networks of international organizations have been highly instrumental in creating this commonality. This paper considers the movement of policy ideas on gender equality by analyzing the changes in political landscape and structures of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) through the prism of institutional isomorphism. It considers on the one hand the phenomenon of the role of IGO’s in sculpting the political environment through the formation of similar forms of social platform organizations in the transnational women’s movement and on the other at the institutional responses to the gender challenge through programs of gender equality policy in internal personnel regulations in IGOs themselves. Are the more passive frames of ‘diffusion’ adequate to explain the remarkable similarities in policy choice for organizations such as the World Bank, ILO, the UN and the EU in addressing their own internal gender equality issues? Is this imitation a consequence of the relative weakness of the issue, the prevalence of inter-institutional meeting networks and professionalization, or of factors such as the relative efficacy of one policy choice rather than another? Case studies of the organizational fields (civil society, member states and bureaucrats) of several intergovernmental organizations (UN, EU, ILO, World Bank) over the period of 1975-2010 will be considered to allow reflection on the relative adequacy of alternative approaches (diffusion, isomorphism, coordination) to understanding mechanisms and impact of diffusion. While the international state regulates the field of social movements, the movement organizations in their turn have been successful in producing change in the organization of the international state itself. The paper sees IGO’s not only as tools but as targets. Do insights around power in institutional theory help explain the limited but similar impact of the gender challenge to IGO gender regimes?