Mainstreaming: Northern Ireland's participative-democratic approach

At a time when both practitioners and academics are calling for a greater understanding and more research into gender mainstreaming, this article develops both a practical case study and explores some of the deeper conceptual understandings of mainstreaming models. Specifically, the article places Northern Ireland within the emerging literature on mainstreaming, establishing it as a valuable case study, based on the breadth and depth of the approach adopted since devolution. The article then develops the understanding of the participative-democratic mainstreaming model from a description of processes to include an understanding of the impact of the origins of mainstreaming on model design.