Description
Could the implementation of EU’s Green Deal, with its focus on a new economic model premised on sustainability and well-being, constitute a moment where feminist understandings of the gendered impacts of economic policy make enter into EU policy discourses? Using interpretive policy analysis approaches (Yanow 2000; Griggs and Howarth 2023) this paper analyses the contestation processes involved in the formulation of EU’s green deal policies, to ask what ‘gender knowledge’ (Cavaghan 2017; Caglar 2010) has successfully entered into the EU’s ‘new’ and ‘greener’ economic model.
Existing feminist analyses of the EU’s economic mode have highlighted how the EU’s existing economic model creates gender inequalities, apportioning disproportionate burdens and disadvantages on some actors, namely women and people of colour whilst simultaneously maintaining a ‘strategic silence’ (Bakker 1994) about these outcomes. These analyses consistently drawn on an expanded concept of the economy which identifies the social reproductive sphere as the foundation of the productive economy, premised on a reproductive subsidy extracted from women and people of colour (Heintz 2019; Nelson 2006; Mies 2014; Cavaghan and O’Dwyer 2018; Cavaghan and Elomaki 2022; Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas 2014). Findings include the consistent erasure of women as economic citizens in EU economic policy (Cavaghan and O’Dwyer 2018) and the systematic misrepresentation of the reproductive economy as an economic drain rather than an economic foundation (Cavaghan and Elomaki 2022). However, the feminist political economy (FPE) frameworks used to date analyse EU economic policy, elide some of the most important economic relationships which the Green Deal rhetorically claims to alter – namely the role of nature and our reliance upon it. They have also consistently restricted discussion of gendered impacts to those felt within the EU’s borders.
To fill this lacuna this paper draws on Ecofeminist political economy frameworks. These have highlighted the gendered and racialized power relations that have hitherto maintained ecologically unjust and unsustainable economic practices creating wealth in Global North countries (Abazeri 2022; Battacharyya 2018; Brand 2022; Fraser 2021; Andreucci and Zografos 2022; Salleh 2020; MacGregor 2021). These generate a new set of research questions regarding the EU’s economic model. How are relationships between humans and nature (explicitly or implicitly) presented in the EU’s Green Deal? What is the role of gendered assumptions or images in the legitimation of these relationships? Have gendered social reproductive subsidies and colonial extraction been problematised or maintained (Cavaghan and Elomaki 2022; Bhambra and Holmwood 2018; Hansen and Jonsson 2018) in any of the EU’s Green Deal initiatives? Whose well-being is included in the EU’s new greener concepts of justice or welfare? Findings sheds light on the gendered implications of the EU’s Green Deal, whilst expanding FPE perspectives on the EU’s economic model, to include 1) the relationships between the EU’s economy and the natural environment, and 2) the EU’s gender constitutive impacts beyond its borders.
