Ecology, Sustainability, and Care: Developments in the Field

ABSTRACT

Over the past three decades, scholars and activists have been attempting to enrich the field of economics with both feminist and ecological perspectives. This essay reviews some highlights of such efforts, describes the current state of the field (particularly in regard to notions of “care”), and introduces a short symposium.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist economics
• ecological economics
• green economics
• gender
• care
• care work

JEL Codes:

• B54
• Q57
• D13

INTRODUCTION

Long neglected in economic analysis, caring, both in the practical sense of hands-on “caring for” and in the emotional and ethical sense of “caring about,” has been a fruitful area of study for many feminist economists. We have explored the many dimensions of care, delved into its implications for economic methodology, and advocated for appropriate support for care work activities, especially those directed toward the young, very old, and ill. Yet many also understand – in a time of crises such as climate change, species extinction, and access to water – that we, as a global society, have also sorely neglected to “care about” and “care for” the natural environment. This symposium was proposed as a way of stimulating investigation into how the feminist economics of care scholarship and ecological economics scholarship might further engage in productive cross-fertilization, and by this contribute to goals of creating societies that are both socially and ecologically sustainable.

A BRIEF HISTORY

This is not the first time that attempts have been made to bring together both feminist and ecological economics insights. Marilyn Waring’s (1988) book If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics brought the neglect of both women’s unpaid work and environmental conservation in the United Nations System of National Accounts to widespread attention. A recent edited volume, Counting on Marilyn Waring (Bjørnholt and McKay 2014), celebrates and extends this insight.

At the fundamental level of defining the field of economics, the authors of this introduction have both argued for a “provisioning” definition of economics (Nelson 1993; Power 2004). That is, instead of defining the discipline around the phenomena of individual rational decision making or images of arm’s-length and self-interested market activity, a more useful definition would be to see the field as concerned with how societies organize themselves to provide for the survival and flourishing of life. This evokes more embodied and dynamic notions of human existence than found in the more typical definitions, highlighting relationships of interdependence and human needs for both material sustenance and care.

Other forays into this territory can be traced by examining publications in each field’s flagship journal, Feminist Economics and Ecological Economics.¹ The latter was the first of the two to attempt a dialogue, publishing in 1997 a special issue on “Women, Ecology and Economics,” edited and with an introduction by Ellie Perkins (1997). Many of the seven contributions to that special issue (Brennan 1997; McMahon 1997; Mellor 1997; Nelson 1997; O’Hara 1997) drew on feminist philosophy of science to re-envision our human relation to the natural world. These feminist philosophers (for example, Merchant [1980]; Keller [1985]; Bordo [1987]; Plumwood [1993]; Harding [1995]; Warren [2000]) pointed to a more interdependent and dynamic relationship, tracing the dominant mechanical and hierarchical worldview to sexist biases that distorted the development of early science. Yet, rather than rejecting a “masculine” worldview for a “feminine” one, most of these essays tend to point toward more adequate understandings that go beyond easy dualisms. For example, in a section of her article entitled “Can Economic Man Become a Caring or Connected Person?” Martha McMahon wrote:

Ecofeminists are cautious about calls to submerge the self in the name of the greater good. Women have long been asked to sacrifice self for those about whom they care – with destructive consequences … In ecofeminist analysis, self and other are neither merged nor opposed. Rather, drawing on feminist analysis of care it attempts to construct a model of a sustainable relationship in which the integrity of both the individual and other, self and nature, are maintained – a feminist ethic is one that acknowledges both interdependence and autonomy (1997: 170).

Others pointed out that in addition to the usual commercial and industrial sectors regarded as constituting “the economy,” sectors of nature and care work are equally necessary and in need of analysis and support (Jochimsen and Knobloch 1997; Pietilä 1997).

Eight years later, Feminist Economics followed suit with an “Explorations” symposium of short contributions entitled “Feminist Ecological Econo-mics,” edited and with an introduction by Ellie Perkins and Edith Kuiper (Perkins et al. 2005). Some of these pieces were similar in theme to the Ecological Economics special issue in that they addressed issues of philosophy and care, though they introduced topics of realism (by Mary Mellor) and Institutional Economics (by Zdravka Todorova). Other contributions focused on gendered aspects of specific situations, including colonialism (by Rayén Quiroga-Martínez), land-grabs in Africa (by Terisa E. Turner and Leigh S. Brownhill), organic farming in Canada (by Martha McMahon), and efforts of a German-speaking association to incorporate gender and social concerns into notions of sustainable development (by Maren A. Jochimsen).

Literature searches using the EconLit database reveal a limited number of further investigations into shared territory in these two flagship journals. A few additional articles in Feminist Economics have dealt centrally with ecological issues, including an early piece by Sabine U. O’Hara (1999) on quality of life indicators, Linda E. Lucas’s (2000) review of the aforementioned Ecological Economics special issue, and Ruth Meinzen-Dick’s (2012) review of Bina Agarwal’s (2010) book Gender and Green Governance. Elaborations on Marilyn Waring’s insights have also received attention in Feminist Economics (such as Perkins [2015]; Saunders and Dalziel [2017]). A number of other articles have touched on the theme of ecological care more tangentially, for example within the context of discussing land rights or rural development.

A review of publications in Ecological Economics turns up articles by two long-time International Association of Feminist Economics (IAFFE) members: Bina Agarwal (2009a, 2009b) on women’s participation in environmental governance in India and Julie A. Nelson (2008, 2009, 2013) on methodological and ethical issues. Agarwal has also served as President of both IAFFE and the International Society for Ecological Economics. A review also reveals a literature that, while drawing somewhat on feminist economics works published in English, draws more deeply on works originally written in German: Adelheid Biesecker and Sabine Hofmeister (2010) use the concept “(re)productivity” to encompass both natural and social relations, while Christine Bauhardt (2014) examines various economic alternatives proposed by the ecological economics community from an ecofeminist perspective. Gender and/or feminism have also received mention in Ecological Economics within various individual articles dealing with topics such as time use or environmental justice.

THE CURRENT STATE OF THE FIELD

This symposium seeks to build on and extend this previous work, with a particular focus on “care” aspects of both the feminist and ecological literatures. The original intent was to create a full special issue of the journal, but the submission and review process made it clear that this was an overly ambitious and premature goal. Feminist and ecological economists need more opportunities for prolonged conversation to discover areas of fruitful collaboration. Nearly fifty abstracts were submitted in response to a (brief) call for papers, and eight drafts were presented for discussion at a workshop on Sustainability, Ecology, and Care sponsored by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Berlin in January 2017. Ultimately, four of those papers were selected for this symposium. It may be informative, however, to get a fuller picture of the state of the field, to consider the sorts of themes and formats that are not ultimately represented in the present symposium, as well as those that are.

The process of reviewing submitted abstracts and the general state of the field for this project revealed that there is substantial feminist work on care that, while interesting, tends to neglect to address environmental dimensions. Much important work has been done, and much remains to be done, of course, incorporating the important work of care, in all its gendered dimensions, into economic analysis. With limited resources, not every scholar can take on the project of learning about and incorporating ecological issues as well. It seems that the barriers between feminist and ecological economics approaches remains, in some areas, high.

Many ecological economics projects that do broach that wall do so by way of case studies of women’s interactions with the environment. Such studies collect quantitative and qualitative data related to gender and, for example, the changing quality of, or management of, specific forest, water, or agricultural resources. Such empirical studies are important in their own right. However, to the extent that such case studies are more descriptive than analytical, and do not advance or inform, at a more general or conceptual level, our understanding of ecology, sustainability, and care, we have not focused on them in the present project.

A dualistic “gender differences” literature has also grown up around environmental issues, borrowing techniques from behavioral economics. That is, some scholars are applying econometrics to experimental or survey data regarding environmentally related beliefs or preferences, broken down by (binary) gender. For example, it may be asked whether women (considered as a generic category) are more likely to act cooperatively in a situation of environmental governance, or are more willing to make pro-environment choices as consumers. Besides adding little to our understanding of care and ecology, the “gender differences” literature has an unfortunate tendency to be riddled with confirmation and publication bias, and to reinforce potentially deleterious gender stereotypes. Often justifying a focus on “differences” with attractive but scientifically debatable stories concerning evolution or hormones, much of this work tends to ignore variations within gender groups, similarities across genders, and the role of culture in shaping preferences and behavior (Fine 2010; Nelson 2014).

Stereotypes are also perpetuated when scholars address issues of care by assuming that a “care ethics” approach (which emphasizes relationships, as contrasted to a “justice ethics,” which emphasizes principles) is primarily taken by women and is synonymous with all of “feminist ethics.” Much empirical work (for example, Jaffee and Hyde [2000]) and analytical work (such as Tong and Williams [2016]), however, call such assumptions into question.

The issue of overly simplistic dualisms also raises its head in discussions about proposed changes to and/or alternatives to the growth-oriented, globalized, and capitalist economies in which most of us currently reside. An abundance of literature within both fields assumes that capitalist economies are by their very nature patriarchal, competitive, populated by autonomous individuals, driven by corporate greed, reliant on perpetual expansion, and destructive of the environment and/or of authentic social relationships. The alternative, it is argued, must be economies that thoroughly reject the capitalist model (often regarded as tough and masculine), in favor of wholesale replacement with economies built around cooperation, interdependence, social solidarity, gift-giving, non-profit institutions, smallness of scale, localism, and so on (often regarded as softer and more feminine). Some of the previously mentioned attempts to bridge the ecological/feminist divide have tended toward such a stance. Such a view, however, assumes that neoclassical economists are correct in their belief that real-world market economies and business firms operate independently of social relations, cooperation, and care. A substantial tradition within feminist economics, in contrast, questions rather than accepts the gendered dualisms underlying neoclassical economics. The admonishment to recognize both autonomy and interdependence in the McMahon quote cited above is one example, as are feminist works addressing the image of homo economicus (Ferber and Nelson 1993, 2003) and the metaphor of the economy-as-machine (Nelson forthcoming).

CONCLUSION

This symposium contains works that push the boundaries of our understanding of ecology, sustainability, and care. These four papers add to our analytical thinking about the intersection of these topics, while encouraging non-stereotyped thinking about gender and careful exploration of concrete issues in economic life. They, variously, examine school meal programs in the United States (Gaddis and Coplen 2018), socially responsible investing (Mussell 2018), the gauging of economic well-being (Berik 2018), and the opportunities offered by changes in (paid) working hours (Dengler and Strunk 2018). We hope that this work inspires scholars in feminist and ecological economics communities to increase our efforts to address issues of both social and environmental sustainability.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are very grateful to the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung for funding and hosting a workshop in Berlin in January 2017 to discuss contributions to this special section, and we are especially indebted to Cäcilie Schildberg for taking on the arranging of this workshop. The generous donation of time by a number of invited discussants, as well as by scholars who had drafted papers, made for lively and helpful discussion. The work of the editorial team and staff of Feminist Economics, careful evaluations by the anonymous reviewers of the submitted papers, and input at various junctures from Sigrid Stagl, were also helpful in moving this project toward fruition.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie A. Nelson

Julie A. Nelson is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Senior Research Fellow at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. Her research interests include feminist economics, ecological economics, economic methodology, and ethics and economics. She is the author of many articles in journals ranging from Econometrica to Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy, author of a number of books, and co-edited (with Marianne A. Ferber) Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (University of Chicago Press, 1993) and Feminist Economics Today (University of Chicago Press 2003).

Marilyn Power

Marilyn Power is recently retired as Professor of Economics at Sarah Lawrence College. She earned her BA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her special interests include economics of gender, race, and class; feminist economics; political economics of the environment; the history of economic thought; and macroeconomics. She is the author of articles in Feminist Studies, Review of Radical Political Economics, Industrial Relations, Feminist Economics, and others, and co-author of Living Wages, Equal Wages: Gender and Labor Market Policies in the United States (Routledge, 2002).

Notes

1 In this brief survey of work on ecology, sustainability, and care, we have concentrated primarily on these two journals and not sought to survey all types of publications, non-scholarly projects, or academic projects outside of the economics discipline (of which there are many). Since judgments about how well various works fit the theme of this issue is somewhat subjective, no doubt we have left out some works that others will believe should have been included.