Feminist Political Ecology And The Economics Of Care

This book envisages a different form of our economies where care work and care-full relationships are central to social and cultural life. It sets out a feminist vision of a caring economy and asks what needs to change economically and ecologically in our conceptual approaches and our daily lives as we learn to care for each other and non-human others. Bringing together authors from 11 countries (also representing institutions from 8 countries), this edited collection sets out the challenges for gender aware economies based on an ethics of care for people and the environment in an original and engaging way. The book aims to break down the assumed inseparability of economic growth and social prosperity, and natural resource exploitation, while not romanticising social-material relations to nature. The authors explore diverse understandings of care through a range of analytical approaches, contexts and case studies and pays particular attention to the complicated nexus between re/productivity, nature, womanhood and care. It includes strong contributions on community economies, everyday practices of care, the politics of place and care of non-human others, as well as an engagement on concepts such as wealth, sustainability, food sovereignty, body politics, naturecultures and technoscience. Feminist Political Ecology and the Economics of Care is aimed at all those interested in what feminist theory and practice brings to today’s major political economic and environmental debates around sustainability, alternatives to economic development and gender power relations.

This book explores the gendered relations of ecologies, economies and politics in communities as diverse as the rubbertappers in the Amazon to activist groups fighting racism in New York and bridges the gap between rural and urban movements.

Destined to transform its field, this volume features some of the most exciting feminist scholars and activists working within feminist political ecology, including Giovanna Di Chiro, Dianne Rocheleau, Catherine Walsh and Christa Wichterich. Offering a collective critique of the ‘green economy’, it features the latest analyses of the post-Rio+20 debates alongside a nuanced reading of the impact of the current ecological and economic crises on women as well as their communities and ecologies. This new, politically timely and engaging text puts feminist political ecology back on the map.

This open access book sets out the contours of feminist political ecology (FPE) as a major contribution to ongoing debates in the field. As Professor Lyla Mehta says in her Foreword, the book is "foregrounding multiple ways of knowing and being, thus enabling new conceptions of politics, justice and alternatives to dominant, capitalist development trajectories". In an innovative methodological twist, the edited book engages the reader in conversations that have emerged from the multi-sited and cross-generational dialogues of the Well-Being Ecology Gender cOmmunities (WEGO) network over the last four years. The conversations explore topics that range from climate change and extractivism, to body politics and health, degrowth, care and community well-being. The authors reflect on their collective learning process as they map out the new directions of FPE research and analysis. The chapters highlight WEGO transnational/transdisciplinary conversations with local communities, social movements and different academic spaces. The book foregrounds the ethics of doing feminist work inside and outside academe and brings to life the importance of doing reflexive research aware of situated historical and contemporary geographical contours of power.

Contributors include Sedef Arat-Koç (Ryerson), Kate Bezanson (Brock), Susan Braedley, (PhD candidate, York), Barbara Cameron (York), Marcia Cohen (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, BC), Marjorie Griffin Cohen (Simon Fraser), Bonnie Fox (Toronto), Meg Luxton (York), Leah F. Vosko (York), and Alice de Wolff (Toronto-based researcher and activist).

Care work, both paid and unpaid, contributes to well-being, social development and economic growth. But the costs of providing care are unequally borne across gender and social class. Feminist scholarship on the gendered construction of welfare provisioning and welfare regimes has produced a conceptually strong and empirically grounded analysis of care, reinforcing the necessity of rethinking the distinctions between "the public" and "the private" as well as the links between them. Yet this analysis, premised on post-industrial contexts, does not travel easily to other parts of the world. Many of its core assumptions – about family structures, labor markets, state capacities, and public social provisioning – do not hold for a wider range of countries. Drawing on original research on the care economy in three developing regions (Africa, Asia, Latin America), this volume addresses a major empirical lacuna while facilitating a conversation across the North-South divide.

As national borders become more permeable, women are increasingly travelling from poor to rich countries to take up jobs as care workers. The struggle to maintain a healthy work/care balance in Western nations is creating a care deficit in the developing world. This volume links ethics to the social politics of care by examining the implications of the feminization of migrant labour and the shortcomings of social policy. From Canada to Sweden and from Korea to Japan, renowned and emerging scholars reveal that a truly feminist ethics of care must be grounded in the concrete lives of real people working in transnational webs of social relations.

A major new work of feminism on the history and persistence of patriarchal hierarchies from the MacArthur Award-winning economist In this groundbreaking new work, Nancy Folbre builds on a critique and reformulation of Marxian political economy, drawing on a larger body of scientific research, including neoclassical economics, sociology, psychology, and evolutionary biology, to answer the defining question of feminist political economy: why is gender inequality so pervasive? In part, because of the contradictory effects of capitalist development: on the one hand, rapid technological change has improved living standards and increased the scope for individual choice for women; on the other, increased inequality and the weakening of families and communities have reconfigured gender inequalities, leaving caregivers particularly vulnerable. The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems examines why care work is generally unrewarded in a market economy, calling attention to the non-market processes of childbearing, childrearing and the care of other dependents, the inheritance of assets, and the use of force and violence to appropriate both physical and human resources. Exploring intersecting inequalities based on class, gender, age, race/ethnicity, and citizenship, and their implications for political coalitions, it sets a new feminist agenda for the twenty-first century.