Political discourse and the translation of global gender-mainstreaming norms in Colombia's National Development Plans

This article examines how globally circulating gender-mainstreaming norms are translated into Colombia's National Development Plans (NDPs) for 2018–2022 and 2022–2026. It asks whether this translation moves beyond discursive recognition towards institutional and redistributive transformation. The study follows a qualitative documentary design based on Critical Discourse Analysis and thematic coding, supported by descriptive text-based techniques such as frequency, co-occurrence, network, and lexical analyses. It combines six textual codes with a relational analysis of gender-related gaps and a qualitative Gender Impact Assessment of the strategic axes of each plan. The findings show that inequality diagnosis dominates the gender discourse in both NDPs, while political participation, institutional capacity, and the institutional mechanisms required for transformation remain weak. Although gender-related content is denser and thematically broader in the 2022–2026 NDP, particularly around care, diversity, peace, and gender-based violence, these changes are not matched by an equivalent strengthening of economic, institutional, and redistributive mechanisms. The overall qualitative assessment shifts from negative in the 2018–2022 NDP to partial in the 2022–2026 NDP. The article argues that the national translation of global gender-mainstreaming norms is uneven and selective: their circulation can broaden the recognition of gender inequality within national planning without producing an equivalent transformation in the institutional and redistributive arrangements required to address it. As a methodological contribution, the study develops a qualitative Gender Impact Assessment scale to examine coherence among diagnoses, programmes, actions, and institutional support in planning documents.