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My doctoral research develops a semiotic and deconstructive framework for analyzing governance texts as performative artifacts—sites where power is consolidated not through redistribution but through language. Using a multi-method design of surveys (n=100), elite interviews (n=16), and policy deconstruction across seven major gender–water frameworks (1979–2024), I demonstrate how “gender equity” circulates as a floating signifier: rhetorically dense, politically expedient, yet structurally hollow. Drawing on Derrida’s différance, Butler’s performativity, and Kanter’s tokenism, the study shows how governance performs inclusion through repetition and spectacle, thereby aestheticizing equity while deferring transformation. Situated within the wider dynamics of performative democracy, this research reveals how institutions stage legitimacy through semiotic compliance with global norms (SDGs, CEDAW, IWRM) while maintaining masculinist hierarchies of authority. The dissertation advances a methodological innovation—semiotic governance analysis—that bridges post-structural theory and applied policy critique, offering both an epistemological challenge to technocratic paradigms and a practical diagnostic for exposing the symbolic architectures of power in development discourse.
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