Care-full Community Economies

Contours of Feminist Political Ecology

In this chapter, we share the insights of feminist political ecology (FPE) for degrowth, building from the debates on “caring communities for radical change” at the 8th International Degrowth Conference in August 2021. We discuss how FPE links to the principles of degrowth as an academic and activist movement and why it is necessary to take feminist political ecology perspectives on care and caring communities in resisting, questioning, and counteracting the structural racial, gender, and wider social inequalities that uphold and are perpetuated by growth-dependent economic systems. As we critically reflect on the experiences of paid versus unpaid, collectivised versus feminised care work, we argue that care is crucial to social and ecological reproduction in order to build just, sustainable and convivial societies.

The reproductive and care work predominantly undertaken by women has historically been undervalued in traditional measures of the economy. However, calls for more work, or better work for women (and men) doesn’t necessarily solve the issues surrounding waged labour such as zero hour contracts, the ‘double work day’, and other forms of increasing precarity and competition. In this article I explore how alternative forms of labour exchange in the Wellington Timebank provide one way in which subjects can partially operate outside the waged economy. I draw on Jacques Rancière’s understanding of how a radical equality underpins a democratic politics to explore the everyday negotiations around labour that occur in this alternative economy. I connect work being done by the Community Economies Collective to ideas of radical equality and a feminist ethic of care to show how embodied and everyday practices like timebanking enable subjects to challenge the inequalities of waged work and in Rancière’s terms, partially construct alternative ‘distributions of the sensible’.

2014

Hence, the multifaceted debates on care and sustainability have not yet succeeded in building a bridge between these two topics. In contrast to a greener economy that maintains the economic structure and profit-making capitalist logic of the existing system, feminists are stressing the need for structural changes in the economic system with an emphasis on integrative and distributional aspects of sustainable development.

Journal of Cultural Economy

The study actualizes cross-connections between 'care' and 'sustainability' as feminist economic theorizing issues. It is about theory of sustainability related to 'caring' based on interdisciplinary (trans/disciplinary) methodology and feminist sustainability epistemology with focus on 'caring' relations (conceptual/not empirical approaches) and its impact on social development of environment today as a fundamental human right. How can one theorize sustainability issues of needed to understand the local to global feminist economies and relation to contextual sustainability? Critical feminist discourses in this study are focused on transitional economies countries (ex/post Yugoslavian MMF 'peripheral' v.s. global countries), austerity measures, monitoring of 'national' household work budgets, unpaid caring labor. This study opens feminist economics theories for developing of international feminist economic programmes and rethinking of monetary unification of 'caring' and 'ecology' today.

This chapter outlines key feminist contributions to understanding the contested meanings of formal, informal, and care economies. It first examines feminist efforts at making visible the essential yet generally unacknowledged unpaid household labor of women. Second, it examines tensions around viewing care work—in both its unpaid and paid forms—as a distinctive form of labor. Third, it provides an overview of feminist writing on the complex articulations of social reproduction and capitalism. Fourth, it addresses the gendered dynamics of paid work. Finally, the chapter turns to a discussion of the gender aspects of informal, flexibilized work that has become increasingly precarious for both women and men. Throughout the chapter, the focus is on the interactions among the gendered formal, informal, and care economies.

Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 2018

This article focuses on feminist analyses and concepts of care, highlighting their potential for the development of a radical reconceptualization of "the economy" as opposed to traditional economic thought. It illustrates how feminist economic concepts of care correspond to feminist sociological and philosophical concepts. We begin by identifying some feminist economic perspectives and their contribution to the assessment, conceptualization and measurement of care as a form of reproductive labor and their critique of neoclassical economics. We then examine some feminist (economic) analyses of capitalist regimes of accumulation and the commodification of care that go beyond traditional economic thought. We conclude by showing how feminist economic conceptualizations of the kind suggested by Ina Praetorius (2015) could be a starting point for rethinking the economy and policy by putting care at their center.

2013

This paper makes a case for reconfiguring current gender and development initiatives that rest on the business case for investing in women as “smart economics" toward noncapitalist practices and ideals associated with the social and solidarity economy. Drawing upon the Community Economies approach of “taking back the economy," we identify the limitations and possibilities for appropriating toward alternative ends the ideals of care, cooperation and interdependence invoked in business-case gender policy frameworks. While cognizant of the potential for cooptation of projects of social economy given the neoliberal economization of social relations that characterizes the business case for gender equity in development, we also locate space to imagine some innovative forms of social economy that can emerge within development’s own fragmented discourses and practices. Finally, we offer some suggestions for connecting gender and development to a politics of ethical transformation ...