Strong Institutions, Weak Outcomes? Gender Mainstreaming in the National Recovery and Resilience Plans of Austria and Belgium

The EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) aimed to steer post-pandemic recovery and accelerate the green and digital transitions. Yet its regulation offered only a weak, non-binding mandate for gender mainstreaming. While this limited provision suggests uneven implementation of gender equality objectives, it remains unclear to what extent and how member states especially those with strong domestic equality frameworks implemented gender mainstreaming within the plans. This paper compares Austria and Belgium - two countries with advanced infrastructures for gender mainstreaming - through documentary analysis of their National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) and elite interviews at national and EU levels. Austria has one of Europe’s most institutionalized gender budgeting systems, constitutionally embedded since 2009 and integrated into performance management. Each ministry must define gender objectives in the federal budget, coordinated through interministerial mechanisms. However, this apparatus intersected only loosely with the RRF process: while line ministries provided bottom-up input, the Ministry of Finance led drafting without linking the plan to the national gender budgeting framework. Gender considerations surfaced sporadically but remained fragmented and peripheral. Belgium, by contrast, anchors gender mainstreaming in a 2007 law and the Institute for the Equality of Women and Men. The Institute conducted a gender-impact assessment estimating that one-fifth of the potential projects would benefit gender equality. Yet the exercise came late - after federal and regional projects were already (pre)selected - and had limited influence on priorities at a stage where partisan negotiations largely governed allocation decisions. Across both cases, strong national institutions placed gender equality on the agenda but failed to translate it into substantive influence over the RRF. In Austria, robust gender-budgeting duties had little bearing on governance; in Belgium, formal assessment mechanisms were outweighed by competing political and economic imperatives. The RRF’s weak mandate, emphasis on speed, and prioritization of green and digital goals curtailed equality actors’ leverage. The findings illustrate that institutionalization is a necessary but insufficient condition for effective gender mainstreaming under weak EU-level governance. Stronger conditionality, clearer obligations, and systematic monitoring are crucial if future EU instruments are to deliver on gender-equality objectives.