Description
The EU’s Green Deal makes bold promises. It aims to achieve net-zero targets by 2050 and to ensure that the transition to a decarbonised economy is ‘just and inclusive’. The Green Deal promises to put ‘sustainability and the well-being of citizens at the centre of economic policy, and to implement ‘a set of deeply transformative policies’.
This paper asks how transformative the EU’s Green Deal really is, by applying ecofeminist analyses to it. These critiques go beyond some of the commonly applied Feminist Political Economy frameworks to examine relationships between nature, people and the economy. Ecofeminist critiques have pointed out how exploitation of natural resources, extraction, dumping, and ecological irresponsibility is actively promoted and incentivised in the current globalised economy, accruing profits to the Global North and driving ‘growth’ (Cohen 2017; Harcourt et al. 2015; Resurrección 2017; Wichterich 2015; Wynter 2003). They also highlight the gendered and racialized power relations that maintain htese ecologically unsustainable and unjust economic practices in the Global North; and gendered and racialised images and epistemologies that make them appear ‘natural’ or legitimate (Dengler and Strunk 2018; Salleh 2020; Shiva and Mies 2014; Di Chiro 2019).
Applying these kinds of critiques, this paper examines how the relationships between people and nature are presented in the EU’s green deal. It asks how the relationships between justice and solutions to climate breakdown are articulated; whose well-being is included in the EU’s concepts of justice (Wichterich 2015; Douo 2021); and how the EU’s continued pursuit of growth in the Green Deal perpetuates or departs from existing hall marks of the EU’s economic organisation and integration – such as gendered social reproductive subsidies (Cavaghan and Elomaki 2021) environmental exploitation and environmental racism (Parasram and Tilley 2018; Hansen and Jonsson 2018).