Localizing the Care Economy

Scholarly and policy concern with the care economy has surged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, thrusting questions of care and social reproduction out of the silo of feminist economics into wider debates on social and economic policymaking and theory, thus raising the political question of redistribution. But while this broader focus is welcome, the debate still tends to theorize the care economy from the dominant vantage point of global north experiences and structures. The risk of this “universalization” of care thinking is that global south contexts and experiences of care become marginalized in the body of literature on and approaches to the care economy. The risk of universal discourses of care is a one-size-fits-all approach, where resultant policies, frameworks, and strategies being proposed for developing care economies don’t adequately reflect existing realities in the countries where they are to be implemented. In this regard, it is possible to draw a contextual and conceptual distinction in the global care and social reproduction literature and aim for a more nuanced conceptualization of the nature of social reproduction between the global south and north.

This research paper has three goals:

• explore the nature of this tension between universalist theories and grounded theories/practices of care in the African context;
• elaborate a conceptual shift; and
• propose frameworks of care that can concretely account for the realities of social reproduction in African/global south contexts.

The paper argues for the importance of examining the care economy in relation to the kinds of power and responses that manifest from below, and therefore the need to give more attention to “economies of care” ‒ i.e. the structures, conditions, and institutions ‒ that support processes of care and social reproduction. The aim is to provide a base and preliminary framework for reimagining care economies that are context-specific, relevant, and responsive to the needs of working people.