Institutionalisation Of Gender Mainstreaming In Urban Governance: A Comparative Analysis Of Barcelona’s Gender Justice Plans (2016–2020 And 2021-2025)

Abstract

Although urban areas are expanding at an unprecedented pace, the specific needs, experiences, and risks faced by women remain insufficiently addressed within urban transformation and governance processes. While women formally possess the right to participate in policy-making and decision-making within urban governance, they continue to encounter significant structural barriers arising from multiple and intersecting axes of inequality  including age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, and disability. This reality necessitates the development of inclusive and gender-sensitive institutional mechanisms capable of integrating equality considerations across all stages of the public policy cycle. Within this context, gender mainstreaming  defined as the systematic incorporation of a gender perspective into all phases of public policymaking has emerged as one of the principal strategic approaches to addressing these structural inequalities.

Analysing the transversal integration of gender perspectives across urban policy domains is therefore critical for evaluating the extent to which women's participation in decision-making processes can be meaningfully enhanced. Drawing on the case of Barcelona, this study examines gender-responsive action plans and explores the opportunities these policies offer for advancing substantive gender equality in urban governance.

The primary objective of the study is to analyse how gender mainstreaming has been institutionalised at the local government level and integrated into urban policy processes through Barcelona Municipality's Gender Justice Plans for 2016–2020 and 2021–2025. The study specifically focuses on the instruments through which a gender perspective has been incorporated into municipal decision-making, budgeting, participation, policy design, and monitoring and evaluation processes.

The research is conducted through a qualitative comparative document analysis methodology. The corpus of analysis comprises Barcelona Municipality's Gender Justice Plans, relevant institutional reports, policy documents, and monitoring and evaluation records. The analytical framework is structured around six key criteria: institutional capacity, horizontal policy integration, participatory governance, intersectionality, implementation instruments, and policy evaluation mechanisms.

The findings demonstrate that, in the case of Barcelona, gender mainstreaming has been institutionalised not merely as a discursive equality commitment but as a comprehensive governance strategy embedded across the full organisational architecture of the municipality. The second plan period, in particular, reflects a significant deepening of the intersectional approach, an expansion of participatory mechanisms, and the systematisation of gender-responsive budgeting and impact assessment instruments. Nevertheless, the study also identifies persistent challenges, including disparities in institutional capacity across departments, implementation gaps, and limitations in the measurement of policy outcomes.

The study concludes that the institutionalisation of gender mainstreaming at the local government level is contingent not solely upon legal and regulatory frameworks, but upon a multidimensional configuration of factors including political will, inter-institutional coordination, feminist movement advocacy, and participatory governance capacity. In this respect, the study contributes to the existing literature by offering a comparative analysis of institutional transformation processes at the local level.