Equality and human rights mainstreaming strategy
Sets out the Scottish Government’s approach to embedding equality and human rights into everything it does across government and encouraging the same approach across the wider public sector.
How is the Scottish Government supporting real change?
To turn this vision into reality, the Strategy aims to support Scottish Government, and the wider Scottish public sector, to embed equality and human rights into everyday work. It offers a framework designed to support organisations and help inform their own mainstreaming plans in ways that reflect their circumstances, role and capacity.
This will be achieved by focusing on the knowledge, experience, and priorities, of Scottish communities. This includes those with protected characteristics as defined by the Equality Act 2010, and others experiencing systemic discrimination and poorer life outcomes.
We recognise that although a strategy provides direction it does not achieve change on its own. To support this Strategy we are publishing two key resources aimed at supporting and driving real change.
Alongside this Strategy, we have published an Action Plan that brings together actions that the Scottish Government is taking to mainstream equality and human rights. This includes 61 cross-cutting mainstreaming actions that have already been committed to elsewhere, such as in response to the recommendations of the National Advisory Council on Women and Girls (NACWG) and our Equality Outcomes published in April 2025.
We are publishing these actions together for the first time to increase transparency, enabling people to track government progress against actions under each of the six mainstreaming drivers. The Action Plan will be an iterative document; we intend to update actions and report progress annually.
The Action Plan will help make the government’s work to mainstream equality and human rights more visible and accessible, but it is the governance behind this Action Plan that will make the biggest difference. Therefore, in the action plan we have committed to develop a robust accountability framework to support the monitoring of this plan and to drive progress against the actions it contains. We will publish this new framework in the summer of 2026 setting out clear structures for oversight, accountability, and delivery.
The Action Plan reflects the Scottish Government’s commitment to leading by example. We aim to demonstrate how public bodies could mainstream equality and human rights with ambition, transparency, and impact.
We have also produced an Equality and Human Rights Mainstreaming Toolkit to support the Scottish Government and wider public sector. This aims to help deliver equality and human rights mainstreaming in practice. It includes a self-assessment tool to help evaluate and strengthen current practice, alongside guidance, best practice examples, and learning materials. The toolkit also provides examples of the steps involved and practical tools that organisations could consider implementing to support their mainstreaming efforts. The toolkit:
- is web-based and accessible to all
- is regularly maintained and updated
- hosts specific tools and acts as a single portal, signposting users to additional resources