The Politics of Care: Feminist Governance in the Italian Post-Pandemic Recovery

This paper contributes to the wide debate on how a gender perspective was integrated into the design of the post-pandemic recovery. This attention is warranted by the widespread acknowledgement that the COVID-19 pandemic was a gendered crisis, whose impact was experienced asymmetrically across different genders. Pivotal in this context was, among other phenomena, the increase in the demand of care, which was disproportionately met by women. With the end of the NextGenerationEU plan approaching, this paper looks at the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) through the lenses of feminist governance, in order to assess the relationship between the institutions and tools adopted to promote a gender inclusive recovery. The analysis therefore adopts a two-level approach. It firstly looks at the care arrangement promoted by the Italian NRRP, through a framework that aims to assess how care responsibilities are recognised, reduced, redistributed, represented, rewarded and reconciled (6-R framework). In parallel, through a revised multiple streams framework, it looks at the role of Women Policy Agencies (WPAs), meaning the set of institutions created to advance women’s rights, in the process of negotiation of the NRRP, assessing their ability to influence both the agenda setting and the decision-making phases of the policy cycle. This analysis provides useful information about the extent of the ability of feminist actors to participate in key phases of policymaking in a context of emergency, pushing for the inclusion of a gendered perspective, as well offering an overview on their key strategies and repertoire of action. Furthermore, the two-level analysis, which looks both at the measures and the process that led to their adoption, draws a comprehensive picture of dynamics and outcomes that characterised the attempt to gender the post-pandemic recovery.