Between policy ambitions and complex realities: exploring the effectiveness of gender policies in Balkan academia

Universities have systematically adopted gender equality policies over the past decades. Nevertheless, progress towards gender equality in academia remains slow. Research reveals that such policies encounter many obstacles and often yield mixed outcomes. Key obstacles indicatively include neoliberal discourses prioritising competitiveness over gender equality, unsupportive organisational environments, and absence of systemic approaches. Despite these valuable insights, university gender policies call for further scholarly attention, as questions persist as to why some policies succeed while others fail. These questions are especially intensified by the scarcity of robust, in-depth examinations capable of comprehensively revealing the dynamics at play; existing studies are often inconsistent and empirically grounded in Western-centric contexts.

Therefore, the present thesis explores the effectiveness of university gender policies. It focuses on how university members perceive and experience Gender Equality Plans’ (GEPs) effectiveness in the under-explored Balkan academia, examining factors that potentially hinder those plans across the policy lifecycle (formulation, implementation, emergent outcomes) in the contexts of Greece, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Situated within the broader landscape of university gender policies, GEPs constitute an emergent policy regime where more reflections on their transformative potential are needed. GEPs’ examination is enabled through theoretical integration of gendered organisations theory with the theory of Complex Adaptive Systems and the concept of complex interventions. The resulting framework and qualitative systems-based process evaluation reveal the multiple factors, in-between interdependencies and feedback loops that hinder GEPs’ formulation and implementation and produce unintended adverse consequences. Theoretically, the thesis advances understanding of university gender policies through a novel conjunctive approach, arguing for the salient role of emergent causality in shaping policy unfolding and outcomes in a dynamic, non-linear way. Empirically, it contributes to the literature on GEPs. It documents factors experienced as barriers to GEPs, pertaining to broader socio-political norms, including regulatory landscapes, local organisational cultures, and stakeholders’ attitudes towards gender issues and GEPs. These empirical insights yield a refined programme theory for GEPs challenging initial, linear assumptions about their progression pathways. Methodologically, the thesis operationalises the complexity of gender interventions and their hosting systems, and provides a blueprint for conducting a qualitative systems-based analysis of complex social interventions related to gender.