Diversity, equity and inclusion in EU public communication. Between policy mainstreaming and communicative clashes

Inclusive communication has become a strategic priority for the European institutions, which over the past decade have built an extensive framework of equality, diversity and inclusion commitments under the Union of Equality agenda. These frameworks, however, do not specify who is accountable for putting them into practice. Whether they hold depends on the daily choices of the people who draft the texts, a level of practice that research has so far rarely examined. The study combines documentary analysis of European policy frameworks and communication guidelines issued between 2018 and 2026 with twenty semi-structured interviews conducted in 2026 with communication officers, policy officials and external practitioners working for European Institutions at the central level. Interview data were analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis. The analysis identifies a condition of entrusted inclusion: inclusive practice is sustained day to day by the discretionary commitment of individual professionals, with limited support from formal organizational arrangements, leaving it vulnerable to changes in personnel and leadership. Three dynamics compound this fragility: the validation chain understood by professionals as a safeguard of quality, is reported to dilute inclusive intent (1); the feminization of the field concentrates inclusion work in roles with limited decision-making authority, reproducing the asymmetries it is meant to address (2); and external backlash produces divergent institutional responses, from resistance to adaptation and formal retreat (3). The internal rules governing AI use in institutional communication, oriented to data protection and factual accuracy, remain silent on the representational quality of generated content, leaving it to review processes not designed for that purpose. The study analyses professional accounts and institutional documents as opposed to communication outputs or audience responses: its claims therefore concern how inclusion is produced and perceived inside the institutions, not the properties of published content. The paper terms these breakdowns communicative clashes: the points at which communication designed to include collides with its own production, representational or reception dynamics. Furthermore, it conceptualizes the gap between policy mainstreaming and structural practice and specifies the organizational dynamics through which inclusive intent is diluted - dynamics that professionals associate with tokenism, diversity washing and algorithmic bias.