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This chapter critically examines the European Commission’s work of governing. Taking the policy programme of Gender Mainstreaming (GM) as an example, Rosalind Cavaghan shows how officials in different units within DG Research interpreted their policy work and the consequences these interpretations subsequently had on governing practices. Her starting point is to argue that existing analyses of EU gender equality policy which focus on legal norms or on formalist accounts of Europeanisation have missed important practices of interpretation. Drawing upon gender theory, Interpretive Policy Analysis and Sociology of Knowledge literatures, she argues that we cannot understand how EU GM policy really works unless we un-pack the spaces, processes and actors involved in the constant renegotiation of the EU. Overall, her findings highlight how European Commission policy is re-made and experienced through interactions between documents and persons which vary across different locations and between sub-units within the same DG. By contrast, an understanding of DG Research as a uniform space would gloss over these processes of contestation and the different mechanisms observable across them.

This chapter focuses on the debate about activation and gender equality at the EU level in general and within the EES in particular. It demonstrates how activation has developed as a network of concepts and meanings in the course of the EES. In particular, it traces the development of concepts, problem definitions, strategies, and priorities in its gender equality dimension. Most important, while this remains contested gender equality has been reframed from a human right to a functional requirement for full employment mainly measured in terms of male/female employment rates.

The second case study focusing on the UK follows the same structure as the first one. Its first part outlines the most relevant welfare reforms and identifies their gender dimension. The second part interprets those changes in terms of shifting citizenship practices. The final section traces the different contestations behind those new practices - from the transnational level as well as from within. The study shows that the activation paradigm has been much more deeply embedded in the institutions and discourses in the UK. While some of the many measures of welfare reform have had positive consequences for the equality between women and men, an explicit gender equality agenda is not part of the larger reform project. This allowed especially previous Labour governments to adopt a role as conceptual leaders of the activation agenda at the EU level.

This is the first of three country case studies, which reconstruct the national debate about activation and transformations of citizenship. The first part outlines the most relevant welfare reforms and identifies their gender dimension. The second part interprets those changes in terms of shifting citizenship practices. The final section traces the different contestations behind those new practices - from the transnational level as well as from within. In Germany the activation paradigm has – although hotly contested – increasingly gained ground and crucially informed massive welfare reforms. At the same time, the course of this conceptual debate has been influenced by a certain mismatch between established national policy-making practices and the ‘soft’ character of the EES as well as by a relatively weak frame of gender equality in the setup up of German welfare institutions. Interestingly the German debate about gender, employment, welfare, and family policies is most controversial within the conservative camp, which encompasses traditionalists and key reformers.