Gender equality and fiscal policy-making: gender mainstreaming in the EU pandemic recovery

While the EU has longstanding formal commitment to gender mainstreaming, gender equality has traditionally remained a blind spot of EU economic governance and crises responses. The paper investigates if and under which conditions the EU response to the pandemic promoted gender-sensitive recovery policies. Next Generation EU entails common funding and priorities, including gender mainstreaming. Yet, the plans are designed at the national level. While the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) represents an unprecedented progress in including a gender mainstreaming mandate, its efficacy in delivering gender-sensitive recovery plans appears limited and heterogeneous across country. The analysis assesses whether and under which conditions the gender mainstreaming mandate of the RRF is effective. In doing so it consider whether the mandate is sufficient in engendering prioritization of gender equality within the plans. Document analysis and elite interviews indicate conditionality through the gender mainstreaming mandate is weak especially against others such as spending allocation targets and CSRs implementation. Gender equality was not a salient priority in the negotiations over the NRRPs and its scope was narrowly understood as related to its growth-enhancing potential. The analysis provides a gendered assessment of the flagship EU response to the pandemic and more broadly questions the effectiveness of (weak) gender mainstreaming conditionality, a cornerstone of the EU gender equality strategy.