Toward a Political Economy of Care: Global South Women’s Networks and the Origins of Feminist Economics

The International Association for Feminist Economics and its eponymous journal started in the early 1990s with particular attention to the ways that prevailing economic models — particularly the neoclassical models then predominant — ignored the vast amounts of time, labor, attention, and expertise required to care for cultures, societies, and environments. At the center of these debates was the critical issue of whether entering the labor market was emancipatory for women. While this field clearly had roots in the 1970s feminist debates about social reproduction and ecofeminism, many of its most prominent figures either came from or worked in the Global South. This paper focuses on three South-based women’s networks — the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD), Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era (DAWN), and the Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanos y del Caribe (EFLAC) — that offered analyses that would later be seen as the most important and prescient contributions of feminist economics, such as degrowth, ecological sustainability, the looming crisis of care. The principal critique of feminist economics — that all extant economic metrics, most especially GDP and the System of National Accounts omitted the largest economic sector — was ineluctably evident in parts of the world with more robust subsistence economies. If the fiction of GDP were clear in places such as New Zealand and France, it was nearly incomprehensible in places such as Zambia and Bolivia. The intellectuals who populated these networks argued for the urgent need to develop a political economic model grounded in wellbeing and sustainability rather than efficiency and productivity.