Revaluing care key to economic sustainability – crisis of social reproduction will destroy the economy.

We can think of retrogression in individual capabilities as a lack of sustainability. The 2012 United Nations conference on Sustainability Development, called “Rio +20” since it took place two decades after the Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, defined sustainability in terms of the ability to meet the needs of present societies without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to similarly meet their own needs. Recast in terms of capabilities, we define sustainability as the ability to realize current capabilities without compromising the ability to maintain and enhance those capabilities over time, including the capabilities of future generations. Therefore, financial crises and macroeconomic volatility compromise the sustainability of human development.

Broadly framed, sustainability has multiple dimensions, comprising the economic, social, and environmental. As this study argues, inequality is a source of economic fragility and imbalance and, as such, is a threat to economic sustainability. Yet inequality also compromises sustainability across its multiple dimensions. An unequal distribution of income and wealth not only creates the conditions for crisis, but is itself a source of political and social conflict. Unbalanced consumption poses threats to the global environment.

Feminist economists have shed light on important aspects of sustainability that are often ignored or seen as lying outside of what is typically meant by the economy. Unpaid labor and nonmarket care work, that is, the vast amounts of time and effort spent raising the next generation, are a fundamental aspect of sustainability, with important macroeconomic dimensions. If nonmarket caring labor did not take place, the economy would eventually grind to a halt; as an essential factor of production, the labor force would be compromised. At the same time, the current way in which this labor is organized, with women shouldering much of the burden in most economies, represents a structural source of gender inequality. This creates a fundamental tension: the current ways in which societies reproduce themselves – an essential aspect of sustainability – perpetuates inequalities that compromise capabilities and human development.

Efforts to eliminate the kinds of financial crises that have occurred around the world in recent decades are an essential part of the broader agenda to realize sustainable human development. However, as we argue in this contribution, such crises are not purely cyclical and have structural causes that also need to be addressed. Insights from feminist economics and heterodox macroeconomics contribute to finding appropriate solutions and policy responses, including taking into account distributional dynamics and nonmarket aspects of social reproduction.