Adaptation of global gender norms in the strategies, policies, and guidelines of international humanitarian organisations: a comparative analysis of the International Rescue Committee and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

Globally-negotiated gender equality norms are articulated in international conventions and frameworks and subsequently institutionalised and adapted by organisations working in diverse sociocultural, religious, political, and legal settings. Drawing on past theoretical and empirical work on norm diffusion and adaptation, this article examines the interaction among global norms, organisational characteristics, organisational policies, and local contexts in humanitarian health responses. We analysed how global gender equality norms are engaged with in the policy and program documents of two structurally distinct humanitarian organisations – the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (including three National Societies) and the International Rescue Committee (including three country offices). We found that despite their structural differences, both organisations demonstrated remarkable coherence with global gender norms, although their approaches to gender varied among sectoral documents and across country offices, particularly within the more decentralised IFRC. In addition, we found the relationship between global and organisational norms to be multi-directional, as organisations engaged with, sought to advance, and advocated for alignment with global commitments, while also using different mechanisms to integrate local feedback into organisational norms. Despite substantial buy-in to global norms among our case organisations, their documents suggested a complex balance among the goals of aligning with organisational gender commitments, adapting to local gender norms and power structures, and prioritising the needs and safety of the communities they worked with, raising complex questions about the value of global and organisational coherence versus local particularity in gender norm adaptation.