Carol Bacchi first introduced her “What’s the problem represented to be?” (WPR) approach in 1991. It is a Foucauldian-inspired approach which aims to make visible the politics and power relations embedded in how problems are being framed in public policies. The approach challenges the idea that policy is self-evident and questions the privileging of expertise and knowledge. It also provides a feminist understanding that all issues affect the lives of women. According to Bacchi’s approach, the relationship between participation, knowledge and power is essential, and leads to critical questions about whose knowledge is considered important, and who may legitimately speak.

The approach mainly revolves around six guiding questions:

• What is the problem represented to be in a specific policy?
• What presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of the “problem”?
• How did this representation of the “problem” come about?
• What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the problem be thought about differently?
• What effects are produced by this representation of the “problem”?
• How/where has this representation of the “problem” been produced, disseminated and defended? How could it be questioned, disrupted and replaced?

In the SEQUAL research project, we use Bacchi’s WPR approach and the guiding questions above to investigate how gender is being represented in policies across different levels of governance: at the UN and EU levels, on climate change adaptation and mitigation policies at national levels in Norway and Spain, on forest and rural development policies in Sweden, and on international development cooperation and development strategies in Burkina Faso.