Discourses and Narratives of Gender Justice Policy-making in Iran: Investigating the Causes and Directions of the Multiplicity of Programs and Policies

Being entangled with the political and social discourses and currents, the policy-making process for women and the family in the field of gender justice has faced high level of complexity in Iran. As a result, many fragmented and conflicting policies has been developed especially over the last two decades. In this way, by focusing on the role of policy actors, this study aims to investigate the discursive causes of this obvious inconsistency in the relevant policy-making process. To do so, by using Laclau and Mouffe's critical discourse analysis theory, firstly, we analyze the dominant discourses as manifested in policy documents in order to represent the existing fragmentation. Then, based on the policy subsystems theory and its arguments about the effect of policy subsystems on the directions of policies, we explore the policy narratives of the supporting and allied actors in the policy making process. Findings show that the gender justice policies in many cases suffer from the untamed fragmentation affected by the multiplicity of the policy subsystems’ discourses. Specifically, when the nodal points of the formal policies’ discourses are compared with the policy narratives used by the actors, the influences of discourse coalitions in the relevant problem-solving process and policy-making is quite evident.