Description
Starting from the constructivist premise that the ideas embedded in policy matter, this paper draws on feminist and ecofeminist and political economy frameworks to analyse on how care and reproduction, in natural and social reproductive spheres are constructed in EU Economic policy after the European Green Deal (EGD).
Feminist analysis of the EU’s growth model before the EGD highlighted how EU policy entrenched created gender inequalities, apportioning disproportionate burdens and disadvantages on some actors, namely women and racially minoritised/marginalised people 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 (Heintz 2019; Nelson 2006; Mies 2014; Cavaghan and O’Dwyer 2018; Cavaghan and Elomaki 2022; Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas 2014). However, the feminist political economy (FPE) frameworks used to date to 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.
To fill this lacuna this paper draws on Ecofeminist political economy frameworks. These throw our attention onto the hegemony of instrumental and exploitative epistemologies that elide the necessity of care and reproduction – not only in relation to social reproduction but also our natural world (Abazeri 2022; Battacharyya 2018; Brand 2022; Fraser 2021; Andreucci and Zografos 2022; Salleh 2020; MacGregor 2021). Findings expand feminst perspecties on the EU’s economic model and make an ecofeminist contribution to existing literatures querying the potentials and limits of green growth and de-growth models (Hickel 2018; Saqer 2023; Mahon 2019; Schmelzer 2016).
