WUNRN
UNRISD - UN Research Institute for
Social Development
Direct Link to Full 40-Page Report:
POLITICAL
& SOCIAL ECONOMY OF CARE
The dynamics of care are receiving increasing attention from
activists, researchers, and policy actors. While this may be in part a
reflection of women’s greater political visibility and agency, and the fact
that once in office they have sometimes championed issues such as family and
care policy, there are also economic and social pressures underpinning academic
and policy interest in this area.
Women's entry into the paid work force—a near-global trend—has squeezed the
time hitherto allocated to the care of family and friends on an unpaid basis.
While the decline in fertility across many regions means that there are fewer
children to be cared for, demographic aging in some countries and major health
crises in others, have intensified the need for caring services. In many
developing countries where public health services have been severely weakened
during the decades of reform, much of the care burden has inevitably fallen
back on women and girls. Paid care services have become a growing sector of the
economy in many contexts, especially in the more developed economies, as a
result of women’s increasing participation in the paid labour force. These
services in turn employ many women. In this context, the quality of care, and
the pay and working conditions of carers, have become contested policy issues.
Paid care services have been susceptible to competitive pressures that generate
low pay/low quality outcomes—adversely affecting both care workers and the recipients
of care.
Recent years have seen a growing literature, from diverse disciplinary
perspectives converging around the issue of care. These intellectual currents
include efforts within feminist economics to construct analytical frameworks
for understanding the “other economy” where the direct production and
maintenance of human beings takes place, as well as methodologies for measuring
and valuing it. From within social policy research there have been concerted
efforts to engender welfare regimes analysis by bringing in issues of care.
Dovetailing, and enriching, these diverse conceptual and empirical engagements,
has been a philosophical conversation about the “ethics of care”, contesting
the narrowness of an ethic of paid work that drives policy agendas and reforms
across welfare states.