The alternative is to affirm feminist economic governance

What would a different system of global economic governance look like that might better fulfil commitments to gender equality and human rights? A gendered analysis of global economic governance would begin from the premise that the social forces engaged in global capitalism and its economic governance are not only structured along the lines of class, race and ethnicity but also are gendered in terms of their prevailing ideas, institutions and power potentials. Some guiding questions might include those listed in Box 7.2. Each of these components of social forces that could reshape global economic governance will now be considered in turn. These consist principally of two broad types: ideologies that justify or legitimate a given political order, and the commonly held predispositions or assumptions that lead people to treat the economic and social world and its interactions as if they are self-evident or part of the ‘common [figure 7.2 OMITTED] sense,’ which structures what is conceived of as possible in the realm of policy/politics. From a gender perspective it is crucial to underline how both the ideology of disciplinary neoliberalism as well as the ‘common sense’ that governs the prevailing concepts of global economic governance does not take into account the economy of daily life: how people exist on a daily and intergenerational basis through the interaction of paid and unpaid work. The dominant perspective ignores the way in which economies are not only a set of financial transactions but also a collection of work and labour processes, some of which are paid and others unpaid, and how each of these processes involves distinct sets of social relations as well as economic inputs and outputs. To understand why this is the case we need to think through the way that production for the market place is related to how families and communities provide the very conditions for production to occur. Thus, productive activities in a capitalist system normally refer to the processes of creating goods and services that can directly create profit. By contrast, the reproductive economy consists of people, and it involves activities and processes that are not merely associated with biological reproduction but also the feeding, caring, replenishing, and daily maintenance and socialization of family, household and community members. Reproductive work and voluntary community work could in principle, be done by men or women – but provisioning has been socially constituted as mainly the responsibility of women rather than men in most societies (Elson 1998). However, it is impossible to conceive of production in the absence of the reproductive economy since it encompasses work carried out by human beings for direct support of the productive sector through for example the produced input of labour. Indeed, US researchers have estimated that accounting for all unpaid domestic work would add 80 per cent to GDP (Zuckerman 2014). However, at best, in the perspectives that prevail in the governing discourses of global economic governance, provisioning remains largely invisible and thus outside of the scope of public policy. At worst it is a lacunae or ‘strategic silence’ in the generic frameworks of knowledge that constitute orthodox economics. By contrast a key focus and purpose of feminist economics is to make this unpaid work visible and thus to reconstitute our understanding of the ‘economic’ in order to restructure the provision of resources (including time) and care in a more equal fashion between women and men, in both private and public institutions. A feminist perspective therefore suggests a wider vision of the economy that sees national output as a product of the interaction of the domestic sector alongside the public, private and financial sectors, producing services that include the reproduction of the labour force on a daily and generational basis. Whilst outside the formal production boundary, this work affects the quantity and quality of labour supplied to production; it also affects ‘the stability of the social framework in which market and state are embedded’ (Elson 2002). Such a vision of the economy, if integrated into the institutions of global economic governance, would transform economic analysis and policy prescriptions. For example, policy makers would include social reproduction (including the ‘care economy’) in considerations of labour market, social, monetary and fiscal decisions since social reproduction normally depends on some form of income support. This can happen through wages, transfers by governments or access to arable land and informal sector activities. Conversely, many of the insecurities that are inherent in the labour market and other forms of access to money are absorbed and mediated at the household level. The degree to which households can respond to market downturns and crises – the extent to which women’s unpaid labour can act as a shock absorber – in turn affects the way economic growth occurs. Whilst many economists recognize gender relations as a factor of analysis at the microeconomic level, macroeconomics remains focused on aggregates and policy objectives such as price stability. The traditional policy instruments of macroeconomics such as fiscal, monetary and exchange rate policies are constructed as if they are gender-neutral (Cagatay and Erturk 2004). If by contrast, there is a recognition that macroeconomic policies rest upon a set of distributive relations across different sectors of the economy and involve distributive choices across various social groups (Elson and Cagatay 2000), then gender relations (along with class, race and ethnicity) should be incorporated into the analysis of those distributive social relations. This would mean integrating an analysis of the gendered divisions of labour and decision making in the different spheres of economic activity. This ‘bottom up’ approach whereby economic policy would be steered by the daily realities of women and men as they experience the intersections of social reproduction, production and finance would go a long way towards ‘re-embedding’ economics in society. Such an approach would ask how people meet their daily needs, what the requirements are for human well-being, how they are being met, what constraints exist to meet such needs, and what economic policies support or undermine daily needs and well-being. Such a focus on the unpaid economy requires a commitment of public investment in basic infrastructure such as access to fuel and fresh drinking water as well as social infrastructure such as health and care services. It will also require some redistribution in the remaining unpaid work between women and men, boys and girls. This would require reconsidering what is meant by progress, efficiency, growth and development. Women’s movements and other civil society groups have argued that we cannot go back to the model of economic development that existed before the crisis as this signalled growing inequalities, environmental destruction and, a growing global domestic crisis witnessed in the huge shifts in social and family arrangements. Restoring growth – a return to normalcy – is insufficient if the goal is a more just, equitable (in terms of class, race/ethnicity, caste and region) and sustainable (conserving natural resources) development (Jain and Elson 2010: 19). This does not mean ‘anti-growth’.8 Economic growth – if it is defined as the increase in the real use-value of economic activity – can mean many different things with different environmental and social implications. If it is simply measured according to conventional national income accounts premised upon exchange-value it can mean more private automobiles or better public transport; more strip mining or child care centres. Thus thinking about organizing the economy in a different way to avoid environmental degradation and to focus on needed social investments and ‘decent’ work which provides sufficient income and recognizes workers’ rights would be part of a new common sense and growth strategy premised upon human needs. For example an element that would be central to a new growth strategy would be food sovereignty, that is, local and democratic control over the provisioning of food, something that has not been delivered by the liberalization of international trade in food. Recognizing that women make over half of the agricultural work force in developing countries, better land rights for women and more equitable public investment and regulation of markets to support women farmers would undergird this new approach (Jain and Elson 2010). In economics, students are demanding a more real world-based curriculum of study that moves away from the neoclassical free market theories and abstractions that dominate teaching and modelling.9 Reform of the educational curriculum more generally and particularly in the field of economics, is a key aspect of creating a new ‘common sense’ of economic literacy that can underpin new frameworks of global economic governance. This will require a revolution in the way in which economics is both taught in schools and universities and discussed in political discourse and particularly in the media, in ways that encourage a variety of different viewpoints and policy prescriptions. It will also require greater representation of heterodox (including feminist) economics in the policy community to realize a more encompassing, democratic model of global economic governance. This means that what is considered a crisis and how winners and losers are identified will also depend on the type of knowledge at the heart of governance: educational efforts of transnational feminist advocacy networks have been important for challenging orthodox economic understandings of global economic governance. They have played a particularly important role in issue creation and agenda setting and influencing policy discourses towards the acceptance of a more heterodox, socially embedded economics (for example, the International Gender and Trade Network, the Working Group on Gender, Macroeconomics and International Economics, the Development Alternatives Network for Women (DAWN) and Women in Development Europe (WIDE).10