The Monetized Economy Versus Care and the Environment: Degrowth Perspectives On Reconciling an Antagonism

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the question of how the current growth paradigm perpetuates existing gender and environmental injustices and investigates whether these can be mitigated through a degrowth work-sharing proposal. It uses an adapted framework of the “ICE model” to illustrate how ecological processes and caring activities are structurally devalued by the monetized economy in a growth paradigm. On the one hand, this paradigm perpetuates gender injustices by reinforcing dualisms and devaluing care. On the other hand, environmental injustices are perpetuated since “green growth” does not succeed in dematerializing production processes. In its critique of the growth imperative, degrowth not only promotes the alleviation of environmental injustices but also calls for a recentering of society around care. This paper concludes that, if designed in a gender-sensitive way, a degrowth work-sharing proposal as part of a broader value transformation has the potential to address both gender and environmental injustices.

KEYWORDS:

• Degrowth
• gender inequality
• sustainability
• work sharing
• gender working time equality
• caring economy

JEL:

• B54
• Q57
• J16

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Ulrike Knobloch for her outstanding support following the 2016 IAFFE conference in Galway. We are also grateful to Miriam Lang, Laura Meijer, Lisa Marie Seebacher, David Weihrauch, and Jan Zoellick, as well as our anonymous reviewers, for providing valuable feedback and support.

Notes

1 In its depiction, our framework further resembles the Cake model developed by Hazel Henderson (1980) and the Iceberg model proposed by Maria Mies (2005).

2 Thereby, this concept can be distinguished from the – in feminist economics, arguably more common – concept of a “care economy,” which is primarily interested in caring activities.

3 However, as Nelson points out, one must not oversimplify matters by merely blaming mainstream economics because the structural negligence of the maintenance economy reflects a “deep cultural pattern of defining male as being opposed to, and superior to, female, and defining rationality as being opposed to, and superior to, nature, matter and emotion” (2009: 3).

4 Gwen Moore and Gene Shackman found that economic growth “may improve women's status by increasing education levels, or decreasing fertility levels, but its direct effect on women's authority positions is small or negative” (1996: 286). Thus, one must also consider that women often tend to end up in rather lower-paying and lower-status occupations.

5 While feminist economics seems to prefer the term “narratives,” degrowth literature rather refers to “imaginaries.” In this article, we use the two terms interchangeably.

6 This, of course, needs to be combined with a system of basic financial provision for people in financially insecure situations, who can otherwise not afford to reduce their amount of wage labor. For a comprehensive discussion of basic income from a feminist perspective, see, for example, Ailsa McKay's (2005) book, The Future of Social Security Policy: Women, Work and a Citizens’ Basic Income, especially chapter 8.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Corinna Dengler

Corinna Dengler studied Economics, Development Studies, and Socio-ecological Economics and Policy in Vienna. She is currently working as a research assistant and studying for her PhD at the University of Vechta in Germany. Her research focuses on combining feminist and ecological economics and puts an emphasis on making degrowth more feminist.

Birte Strunk

Birte Strunk studied Liberal Arts and Sciences in Maastricht and London, focusing on International Relations and Political Theory. She currently works as a teaching assistant at University College Maastricht, teaching in modules such as Theory Construction and Modeling Techniques or Philosophy of Science.