From Knowledge to Prescription: International Organisations’ Engagement and Normative Underpinnings in Work–Family Policy

Work-family policies occupy a pivotal position in gendered welfare regimes, given their role in structuring care arrangements, labour markets, and gender norms, and thereby shaping family well-being and women’s employment. While traditionally treated as a domestic policy domain, work-family policy has increasingly become subject to transnational influence, involving a growing number of international actors. Among them, International Organisations (IOs) have emerged as prominent actors in shaping national policy agendas. Rather than relying on hard governance, IOs primarily exercise influence through soft governance mechanisms, particularly by producing and disseminating policy-relevant knowledge. They develop indicators to measure specific aspects of the policy fields they engage with, reflecting specific understandings of problem constellations and preferable policy options. Such indicators are subsequently applied to comparatively assess member states, and the resulting assessments translate into datasets, reports, and policy briefs. Existing research shows that such soft governance through knowledge instruments enables IOs to prioritise specific issues, frame policy problems, define legitimate solutions, and, ultimately, foster benchmarks and policy learning among member states. While these dynamics have been extensively studied in policy areas such as education, economic regulation, and good governance, they remain underexplored within the domain of work-family policy. This paper examines IOs engagement in the global governance of work-family policy, how their knowledge is constructed, and how they project their knowledge-based authority into national policy debates. We focus on two prominent organisations: the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank, and systematically compare their involvement in work-family policy. The paper interrogates the indicators, comparative evaluations, and resulting policy-relevant outputs, such as policy prescriptions, as well as the normative assumptions regarding work-family policies embedded in the production and application of their knowledge. The analysis reveals that global work–family policy governance is neither centralised nor coherent, but fragmented across IOs, each with distinct understandings, priorities, indicators, problematizations, and solutions. IOs priorities vary between labor market participation and economic efficiency, vis-a-vis child well-being, poverty reduction, or social investment. This paper contributes to the scholarship of IOs and policy expertise, by demonstrating how different IOs produce and diffuse their knowledge, which can lead to potential overlap and competition of knowledge in work-family policy.