Commoning Care: Feminist Degrowth Visions for a Socio-Ecological Transformation

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the question of how to organize care in degrowth societies that call for social and ecological sustainability, as well as gender and environmental justice, without prioritizing one over the other. By building on degrowth scholarship, feminist economics, the commons, and decolonial feminisms, we rebut the strategy of shifting yet more unpaid care work to the monetized economy, thereby reinforcing the separation structure in economics. A feminist degrowth imaginary implies destabilizing prevalent dichotomies and overcoming the (inherent hierarchization in the) boundary between the monetized economy and the invisibilized economy of socio-ecological provisioning. The paper proposes an incremental, emancipatory decommodification and a commonization of care in a sphere beyond the public/private divide, namely the sphere of communitarian and transformative caring commons, as they persist at the margins of capitalism and are (re-)created by social movements around the world.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Degrowth aims at creating human flourishing within planetary boundaries.

• As feminist degrowth scholarship, this study discusses degrowth visions for care work.

• It problematizes the shifting of yet more unpaid care work to the monetized economy.

• Instead, it proposes collective (re)organization in the sphere of the commons.

• Caring commons are no automatism for a gender-just redistribution of care work.

KEYWORDS:

• Degrowth
• care work
• commons
• decolonial feminisms
• socio-ecological transformation
• sustainability

JEL Codes:

• B54
• Q57
• J15

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Svenja Dirschbacher, Max Gabel, Maren Jochimsen, Ann-Christin Kleinert, Ulrike Knobloch, Edgardo Lander, Anna Saave, Lisa Marie Seebacher, Andrea Sempertegui, Birte Strunk, as well as our anonymous reviewers, for providing us with valuable feedback and support.

Notes

1 Drawing on the example of care, degrowth advocates would call for qualitative growth in the sense of more time for preventive and holistic care, fair wages, and dignified working conditions.

2 In summarizing these four strategies, Knobloch (2013) refines Mascha Madörin's work on the matter.

3 The same holds true for the left side of the triangle, where ecosystem functions (biocentric ecological processes) are converted into ecosystem services (anthropocentric notion of how ecosystem functions are beneficial for humans) through an economic framing and often commodified. It exceeds the scope of this paper to go into this debate, however, Gómez-Baggethun and Ruiz-Pérez (2011) is a good read on the matter.

4 Polycentricity, a concept first deployed by Michael Polanyi, was mainly refined by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom for the field of governance studies and describes the coexistence of autonomous decision-making centers. In the last decade, there has been increased scholarship on polycentricity as foundation for the commons (Carlisle and Gruby 2019; Euler 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Corinna Dengler

Corinna Dengler is a feminist ecological economist and degrowth scholar activist based in Bremen, Germany. She successfully defended her PhD titled “Feminist Futures: What Degrowth learns from the Feminist Critique of Science, Economics, and Growth” at the University of Vechta in August 2020 and is currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher at the department for Development and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kassel. Her research focuses on the intersections of feminisms, decoloniality, and the environment.

Miriam Lang

Miriam Lang works as Associate Professor in the Area of Environment and Sustainability at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Ecuador. Her research focuses on development critique, systemic alternatives, and the territorial implementation of Buen Vivir. She combines decolonial and feminist perspectives with political economy and political ecology. The book Beyond Development – Alternative Visions from Latin America, which she co-edited in 2013, has been translated into nine languages.