Equality and human rights mainstreaming strategy

What is Mainstreaming

In the context of this Strategy, mainstreaming means putting equality and human rights at the core of your business.

Instead of treating equality and human rights as separate tasks, mainstreaming aims to make them part of how organisations think, plan, and deliver services. By embedding equality and human rights into core functions, we can tackle persistent inequality. A mainstreaming approach acknowledges that equality and human rights affect everything an organisation does. In practice, this means that equality and human rights are integral to how:

• decisions are made
• policies are designed and developed
• services are delivered
• money and resources are allocated

For the Scottish Government, mainstreaming requires removing systemic barriers. It means changing how decisions are made. It also requires establishing the culture and practice that ensure policy and service delivery permanently focus on equality and human rights. We encourage the wider public sector to consider doing the same.

Mainstreaming is an approach to promote and embed equality and human rights. It represents long-term, sustainable, and adaptable cultural change. Rather than being a final goal, mainstreaming is a method or programme of work that helps achieve the broader aims of equality and human rights.

The concept of mainstreaming equality and human rights is underpinned and supported by several cross-cutting principles. These include the following:

• A human rights-based approach, giving people a greater opportunity to participate in shaping the laws, policies and practices that impact on their human rights; increasing the ability of those with the responsibility for fulfilling rights to recognise and respect those rights; and making sure they can be held to account. It also means ensuring non-discrimination, equality and the prioritisation of the most marginalised. This means ensuring people’s rights are at the centre of policy development and implementation, using approaches such as the PANEL principles.
• An intersectional approach that recognises that individuals can experience multiple forms of discrimination or privilege based on their intersecting social identities, such as race, gender, sexuality, disability, and class. We recognise that disadvantage is experienced in groups beyond those defined under the protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010, Often people face more than one kind of discrimination at the same time and that can deepen inequality. For example, a disabled woman from an ethnic minority background may experience discrimination not just because of her disability, gender, or ethnicity individually, but because these factors can combine and reinforce each other, creating more complex and significant barriers to equality.
• Scottish Government defines intersectionality as “[a] term used to describe how race, class, disability, and other characteristics ‘intersect’ with one another and overlap”.
• Avoiding homogenising equality issues. Homogenisation refers to treating all groups in society and forms of disadvantage as if they are the same, rather than recognising the distinct forms of disadvantage faced by different groups

Overall, the principles aim to put equality and human rights at the heart of policymaking in a way that addresses the needs of diverse communities and empowers and equips people to claim their rights.

Mainstreaming helps to ensure that consideration of all equality and human rights is central to the activities of the Scottish Government, and the wider Scottish public sector. These activities include;

• policy development, both new and revised
• operational delivery
• research and routine data collection
• legislation
• financial and budgetary planning
• resource allocation
• implementation, evaluation and monitoring of programmes and projects

Why mainstreaming is important

The Social Renewal Advisory Board Report (2021) said: “… we need to move equality from the margins of policymaking and service delivery to its very centre. Covid-19 has exposed that failing to deal with structural racism, sexism and ableism is literally a matter of life or death … More than a decade of ‘equality mainstreaming’ has not brought about the change we need to see. All public bodies, including the Scottish Government, need to scale up their capacity and ability to address racism, sexism and ableism. Public authorities should also be accountable for their actions to realise the rights set out in international frameworks that Scotland is committed to deliver. We need to be able to demonstrate that we have turned our equality and human rights ambitions into reality …”

We recognise this need and know that truly embedding equality and human rights into the work of the Scottish Government and wider public sector is the only way to address persistent and systemic inequality. Together, this suite of Mainstreaming Strategy, Action Plan and Toolkit is intended to provide strategic focus and direction to help meet our shared ambitions, alongside practical support to assist organisations in strengthening their own approaches, regardless of an organisation’s role or resources.