Making diversity policies under political pressure

Bibliographic Data

ID24226192
AuthorsLieke Van Der Veer (0000-0002-3264-7621, Delft University of Technology)
Year2026
Pages1-20
Publication date2026-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Community (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0047-9586 • E-ISSN: 1469-9451
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1369183x.2026.2725422
OpenAlexW7204914904
LanguageEN
References cited45

Critical diversity studies claim that diversity policies are often devoid of meaning – which is said to impede the efficacy of these policies for social justice. This alleged meaninglessness, however, is rarely treated as the result of bureaucrats’ affective imaginations of these policies. We know little about the feelings of bureaucrats that precede diversity’s discursive meaninglessness and about reluctance to act as a result of specific political imaginations. This article studies politically sensitive forms of manoeuvring that emerge in bureaucrats’ attempts to ‘safeguard’ diversity within municipal policy to make it ‘sustainable’ in a time of (far) right-wing upsurge. These forms of manoeuvring lead my inquiry into the ‘institutional work’ that diversity workers engage in across changing political tides. By following the process of making a particular diversity document in a Dutch city administration in the middle of a right-wing-voting rural area, I add ethnographic detail to studies on coping mechanisms of bureaucrats faced with political pressure. In showing how bureaucrats affectively imagine diversity policies – in retrospect, in the present, and into the future – I argue that backlash against diversity asks for new analytic tools to grasp the changing politically prefigurative meanings of what diversity policies were, are, and could be.

Bureaucracy · diversity policy · institutional work · municipal policy · policy sustainability · political pressure · Social justice · Gender Diversity and Inequality · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Public Policy and Administration Research

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