(Re)thinking Care in a Development Context

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(Re)thinking Care in a Development Context

• Shahra Razavi Research Coordinator, UNRISD18
  June 2009

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• Feminist literature on Welfare Regimes and Care
  Regimes
• Response to mainstream welfare regime
  literature conceptual theoretical
• Focus post-industrial, democratic welfare states
  
• Global care chains unequalizing tendencies of
  neolib glob. but empirical emphasis on the
  North
• Where is the rest of the world?

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• Feminist research with a focus on the South
  (including UNRISDs)
• (1) Care as a lense to interrogate policies and
  socio-economic structures
• (2) Care economy and what ever happened to
  domestic work
• (3) The care diamondmultiple institutions to
  highlight the role of public policies and
  collective provision
• (4) Care diamond and the welfare mix

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• (1) Care as a lens
• The welfare state was/is also about CARE (health,
  education, nursing homes, pensions)
• The responses to the social question also about
  problems of dependency and care (of children,
  when old and sick, etc.)
• The family wage also about allowing the
  breadwinner to earn enough to allow the family
  to care of itself
• Care as a lens/perspective (versus a sector) to
  interrogate all policies (wage policies,
  macroeconomic policies) for their care
  implications
• v crucial for developing countries
  PRECONDITIONS of care-giving cannot be taken for
  granted

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• What are these PRECONDITIONS of care-giving?
• v TIME
• v COMMODIFICATION OF LABOUR (esp. female
  labour) with decent wages
• v Appropriate INFRASTRUCTURE
• Time poverty AND income poverty
• v Time-poor and income-rich
• v Time-poor and income-poor (e.g. India,
  Tanzania)
• v Time-rich and income-poor (e.g. Southern
  Africa)

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• Care lens to look at the process of capital
  accumulation rather than assuming a priori that
  development/growth will lead to an improvement in
  care-giving and human welfare.
• What are the Policies/Development Paths that
  Generate Structural Unemployment or
  Low-Wage/Return employment?
• v Why does capital no longer want the labour
  it pulled from rural households over generations?
  v Why does labour earn such low wages despite v.
  long hours of work ( the working poor )?
• What happens to care in the process of capital
  accumulation (a necessity for developing
  countries)?
• v e.g. Export-Oriented path Are there
  investments (in infrastructure, services) to
  reduce the time squeeze on care?
• What happens to care in contexts of crisis which
  liberalized economies are prone to (as more of
  social reproduction shifts back into the
  household and women are pushed into the paid work
  force)?

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(2) Care economy and what ever happened to
domestic work

• Care work interpersonal dimension, building
  human capabilities
• Income and class bias
• UNRISD definition of unpaid care work person
  care AND domestic work

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(3) The Care Diamond (sector view)

• Multiple sites of care provision
• Why emphasis on multiplicity?
• v highlight role of public policies in developing
  countries (not only families)
• v avoid an agenda that is exclusively focused on
  microlevel interventions (better fatherhood, new
  masculinities)
• v STRUCTURES matter (labour markets) and so do
  PUBLIC POLICIES/PROGRAMMES (to collectivise care
  and redistribute its costs across social class
  towards low-income large families).

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• (4) Care diamond and the welfare mix
• To orchestrate public, private (for-profit) and
  non-profit provision requires states with strong
  fiscal and regulatory capacity (to subsidise and
  regular quality of service and working conditions
  of service workers)
• In contexts of high income inequality pluralism
  can lead to exclusion (inability to pay
  fees/bribes or give unpaid time), fragmentation
  and varied quality of provision
• There is always the risk of labour exploitation

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• Project Countries and research reports available
  on UNRISD website ().
• India, Nicaragua, Tanzania, South Korea,
  Argentina, South Africa
• Japan and Switzerland Uruguay (desk study)
• RR1political, economic, social and demographic
  background
• RR2time use analysis
• RR3care diamond
• RR4care workers and their terms and conditions
  of work (being revised
• RR5synthesis of findings and conceptual
  elaboration (due in June 2009)
• www.unrisd.org/research/gd/care

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Comparative Country Data Overview
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