Putting a price on care work
- Ufrieda Ho
Revaluing care for the way it connects people, nature and climate change can help society better withstand crises.
What does it cost to collect firewood to cook tonight’s dinner or to water the food gardens that feed a community? What about clearing litter clogging up a river?
There are no clear answers because care and care work have, for the longest time, remained unseen, under-valued and underpaid.
This is because “care work is gendered” according to Sonia Phalatse, a researcher at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at Wits.
Phalatse’s work focuses on feminist economics. She looks at the structural inequalities in society that diminish the value of work done by women and girls, even though their roles as carers are foundational to sustaining families and communities.
According to a UN Women's report, “on average, women undertake 2.5 times more hours every day on unpaid care than men. Girls learn this early and around the world provide 160 million more hours every day on unpaid care and domestic work than boys”.
This has profound implications for climate mitigation, adaptability and resilience within communities, given that the main stewards of our natural environment are women carers.
Transforming mainstream economics
By highlighting this climate-care nexus of two systems that are deeply under- appreciated in current economic contexts, researchers hope to steer policy direction proactively.
The recognised advantages of this conceptual reframing have resulted in the launch of a grant-funded transdisciplinary research project.
Phalatse says that the work will be about the deep transformation of mainstream economics which must lean into a better way to value care and carers, in order to build a system that is robust enough to withstand the coming onslaught of extreme weather events.
“Our focus is on asking how we can reorientate or create revaluing of the economy towards care,” says Phalatse. “Deep transformation is no longer about reforming what exists but centering care in the conversation, especially in economics. We are calling for the kind of transformation of economies in which the objective is people, people’s wellbeing and their ability to thrive, as opposed to economies just about growth and profit-making.”
The new three-year research project will focus on evidence collection, creating a hub for future work in this area and creating the pathways for the research to shake-up outdated thinking and better inform policymaking.
“The key strength of the project will be to draw in more disciplines,” says Julia Taylor, also a researcher at the Centre, working on the climate-care nexus project.
Taylor points to the recent roundtable and dialogue sessions coordinated by the Wits Institute for Socioeconomic Research and the WitsH2O Centre that focused on the water crisis. It was intentionally inclusive and diverse. Participants included a visual artist who used their creative expression to make beads that look like water and an activist that gave grassroots insights into the fight for water as a basic right. Taylor’s own presentation focused on water and economics and the mounting threats of water privatisation and its use as a financial instrument internationally.
Water is becoming something to invest in and to profit from and this raises the alarm of potential exploitation and control of a scarce resource that’s critical for life itself.
“These conversations might be a bit open-ended but they spark something. In having a space to share different work we can break down silos. It enhances our understanding of key environmental issues and also shifts the way we see them,” says Taylor.
Researchers want to adopt a similar dynamic approach with the climate-care nexus work.
Caring for each other … and the environment
“We look at care as domestic work, child care, healthcare systems and education systems but the thinking hasn't really been applied in the same way to environmental care, even though issues of climate change and care are becoming more obvious and should be highlighted in climate policy,” says Taylor.
For Phalatse and Taylor’s colleagues based in the School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences (APES), the resonant and potential impact of the climate-care nexus research is clear.
Professor Chevonne Reynolds, a lecturer in APES, is a collaborator on the project. She says that it marks a true meeting between the science faculty and economics.
Reynolds identifies learnings that can be shared. The thinking on financing care work could borrow from models in the nature space, for instance. “It’s looking at how the likes of carbon credits, biodiversity credits and green bonds are used and how they could be similarly applied to the broader care economy,” she says.
By using the framework of feminist economics on the other hand, ecologists can embrace and enlarge the frame of care within the ecological space. “We know, for instance, of people working to protect rhinos or endangered wildlife but we have neglected all the other things people do on a daily basis. One big area is the support of rural livelihoods and ecological stewardship as ecological care work,” Reynolds says, adding that care extends to volunteers doing the likes of bird counting, river clean-ups or planting indigenous gardens.
“There is incredible work being done but we are not actually taking stock of it all and it sits in completely different framings. So, building a way of bringing all of this work under one umbrella and recognising its value is important,” she says.
Reynolds believes that the climate change-care nexus research could ultimately be groundbreaking because of its potential for cross-cutting impact for finding solutions to the polycrises that mark our time.
“All these crises – the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, invasive species, pollution, health crises and equity crises all stem from the same cause, and it’s that we have forgotten to value care,” she says. “Instead of having individual social, economic or environmental policies that try to tackle systemic issues but do not really get to the root of the problem, changing the value of care can be a cross-cutting way to a solution. It’s a profound reframing.”
- Ufrieda Ho is a freelance writer.
- This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by Wits Communications and the Research Office.
- Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.