Rethinking SDG 5 through Feminist Institutionalism: Gender Regime and Development in Türkiye

This article critically examines Türkiye’s performance on Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG 5) by conceptualizing gender equality not as a technical objective to be measured through bureaucratic indicators, but as a politically contingent and institutionally embedded process. Drawing on feminist institutionalism’s emphasis on the interplay between formal and informal structures and integrating Jessop’s concept of “gendered selectivity,†the study explores how state strategies have reconfigured women’s position in development through conservative, familial, and normative filters. It argues that while Türkiye’s earlier development plans adopt “add-on†strategies aligned with the Women in Development (WID) paradigm, thereby reproducing the rhetoric of technical equality, they systematically neglect the structural and transformative agenda advanced by the Gender and Development (GAD) approach. The study shows that this gap has significantly widened over the past decade, as the consolidation of a neoliberal, religious, natalist, and conservative gender regime has progressively eroded earlier formal gains in gender equality. Within this framework, women are increasingly framed not as autonomous rights-bearing subjects, but as auxiliary actors responsible for unpaid care work within the family. Policy documents such as the 11th and 12th Development Plans, the Women’s Empowerment Strategy Papers, and the Family Protection Vision Document reveal a shift from rights-based equality and women’s empowerment to a technocratic and instrumental discourse that prioritizes familial roles and the strengthening of the family. The article ultimately argues that Türkiye’s SDG 5 performance is shaped less by women’s formal inclusion in development than by the structural redefinition of equality under a conservative, family-centered gender regime, one in which informal norms increasingly govern formal institutions and gradually dismantle hard-won feminist gains.