Gender Equality Plans Beyond the European Union: Sustainability and Feminist Institutional Transformation in Turkish Higher Education

The sustainable development approach positions higher education institutions not only as structures that produce education and research, but also as actors of sustainable governance that drive social transformation. Within this framework, United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG 5) envisages the holistic integration of gender equality into institutional policies, while Gender Equality Plans (GEPs) have become one of the fundamental tools for sustainable institutional transformation in universities within the scope of the European Union’s research and innovation policies. However, empirical studies addressing whether GEPs produce concrete institutional transformation rather than symbolic compliance have been largely neglected outside EU countries. This study conceptualises feminist institutional transformation not as an immediate outcome of adopting a Gender Equality Plan, but as a contingent and potentially long-term process. The research adopts a mixed-methods design combining analytic autoethnography with descriptive quantitative analysis, drawing on the experiences of a researcher directly involved in the GEP preparation process, institutional documents, meeting records, administrative correspondence, and institutional data. The findings demonstrate that the GEP preparation process is more than a technical planning activity; it is a multi-actor transformation process shaped through institutional support, feminist coalitions, sex-disaggregated data production, institutional learning, and negotiations conducted through informal rules. By examining the GEP preparation process at a Turkish public university through the combined lenses of analytic autoethnography and feminist institutionalism, this study offers an empirical and theoretical contribution to the international literature on the institutionalisation of gender equality policies in higher education.