The Pact for the Future: a chance to re-align our economies to care for people and planet
The UN Summit of the Future was billed as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to ‘forge a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future’, a recommitment to the Sustainable Development Goals; at the Summit, States adopted the Pact for the Future.
To many in civil society the Pact felt like a letdown, stopping short of the deep shifts needed to address our broken social contract and change how we approach our economies, societies, our planet. Particularly as feminists, witnessing the struggle to keep even existing commitments on gender inequality in the Pact is a depressing reminder of how much work lies ahead on the path to a just future.
We urgently need a transformative shift towards economies and societies that centre care and wellbeing of people and planet, that invest in care services and infrastructure, to ensure the universal right to care, decent work and green industries, rather than increasing wealth for a few. But how can we shift the inertia of economies wedded to ever-increasing profits and GDP growth?
The day before the Summit for the Future, Oxfam and partners convened a discussion on this, co-chaired by Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, and Alexandra Haas of Oxfam México, with experts Bisrat K Dessalegn from Akina Mama wa Afrika, Verónica Montúfar of Public Services International, Chidi King of the International Labour Organization, and Raquel Coello of UN Women. What follows is based on their input during the panel.
“We need a profound shift in mindset and policies. We need to recognise care as a public good, essential to all society and wellbeing.”
A mindset shift: rebuild the social organisation of care
To this day, most governments fail to centre care in their policies as a universal human right and public good.
“We must acknowledge that care is central to human wellbeing and sustainable development; and that care work is essential to all other work.”
We need to rebuild the social organisation of care , recognise the economic and social value of care and reorganise who does care and how within society, across all actors (families, communities, the state, private sector). You can read more here about the ILO 5R framework for Decent Care Work and how it helps recentre and revalue care work. This means no longer treating care as a market-driven commodity, but as a public good, embedded in principles of human rights, universality, and public-ness including being grounded in social dialogue and representation (see for example the PSI care manifesto and a recent landmark ILO Resolution), beyond the “care economy,” – which is the sole and brief way in which care is mentioned in the Pact.
“Public services, as public goods in public hands, really act as equalisers in society and they help to materialise the real exercise of all human rights of populations.”
As part of this reclaiming and reorganising, we must insist on just pay and collective bargaining and labour rights for those doing paid care work – often women from marginalised groups, like racialised or migrant communities, and often working in informal or poorly regulated settings from the Global South. The way in which our societies treat (paid) domestic care workers, for example, is a crystalisation of how our societies actually value (or don’t value) care work, paid or unpaid. We can also re-examine how care wages are set.
Moving the machinery: why and how to look beyond GDP
The success of economies is most frequently viewed through the lens of ‘gross domestic product’ (GDP), but this means we pursue GDP growth as the ultimate goal instead of things more central to our societies - like care. Among other things, GDP is outdated, Euro-centric, doesn’t reflect the contexts we live in, and doesn’t reflect the realities of our interconnected world. It measures only what is monetised and ignores what is truly important – including the care work that sustains our societies and is done overwhelmingly by women and marginalised groups. Worse still, it doesn’t distinguish between production that harms and production that benefits- some things that cause environmental harm are counted ‘positively’ towards GDP – for example, investing in fossil fuels. The focus on GDP growth also leads to a co-dependency between the state (which provides infrastructure and an enabling regulatory environment) and corporations (which provide tax revenue), but excludes communities. But governments also remain wedded to GDP because GDP determines important considerations including countries’ ability to access loans or development assistance.
“Valuing care work isn’t the same as subjecting it to law of supply and demand and market prices. We need to value it, draw consequences from the enormous contribution it makes; and to do this we have to avoid putting value only on what is monetary value rewarded by markets.”
The Pact offers a ray of hope: it does provide next steps in developing a set of globally agreed metrics that complement and go beyond GDP. Everything is still up for debateprepare the ground for a transformative shift that dislodges GDP from prominence, it is vital that new metrics of ‘success’ capture wellbeing here and elsewhere, care work, environmental and ecosystem health, carbon emissions, income inequality, social equalities. New measures need to be based on data that is disaggregated along the lines of gender but also race and other lines of intersecting inequalities – the kind of better data that feminists have been demanding for years.
“We need to talk about care economy, potential jobs and wellbeing that could come from it, but we also need to think beyond care ‘economy’ – care as dimension of public good, promoting caring societies beyond economy, how we all are entitled to care, and can be care givers and care receivers, with the right to receive and give care with decent work conditions.”
For instance, new metrics could use data on progress closing the gender pay gap, especially in heavily feminised sectors of the workforce (health, education, care); as a recent report shows, tackling the gender pay gap in those sectors alone would have a significant impact on the global pay gap. If we tracked the gender balance of people employed in these sectors as well, we could measure success in re-valuing and reorganising care work societally. We could measure progress in the proportion of people doing care work (paid and unpaid, formal and informal) who have decent work and working conditions. These are just three concrete ways to measure progress on both gender equality and our ability to reorient our economies around what truly matters to a just future. There are also tools like georeferential mapping of accessibility of care services; and comprehensive care policies like those in Latin America. It is also vital that beyond-GDP metrics include clear ways to look at progress tackling gender-based violence (GBV) which is a critical marker for progress on gender justice more broadly but which we also know in particular is an issue at work for those doing care and domestic work.
Other metrics could come from the vast experience that exists with using time-use data, showing levels and inequalities in time poverty and unpaid care in households and societies more widely; or definitions and metrics like those ILO statisticians have been working on) to help reduce and redistribute it. Data like these would help answer the question of how much it is costing us to NOT care.
“When we speak about care, we are always asked how much it costs to care. But the question we haven’t answered is how much it costs us not to care. This question would drive rethinking our priorities, and rethinking the cost of having an economic system that puts goods and services above people.”
Holding those in power to account
As activists, we need to build our movements to push for these truly transformative beyond-GDP metrics rooted in care. We need to demand a participatory process for developing these metrics, one that centres the voices of women, feminists, Indigenous people, youth, LGBTQIA+ people, anyone at the intersections of oppression. How we measure success beyond GDP is not simply for technical experts, it is a matter of justice, inequality, and the rights and realities of people.
In both policy and public discourse, we need to hold power-holders to account for this shift we so clearly need, from insisting we re-position care as a public good and human right, with the state as duty-bearer, to opening up the ‘technical’ beyond-GDP discussions to become transparent and participatory at all levels. level. Our future depends on it.
“One of first challenges is to make sure these new wellbeing measures include care because in economic, social and environmental dimensions we know there is an explicit and implicit dimensions related to care, but care isn’t mentioned.”
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The panellists and co-chairs were:
- Bisrat K Dessalegn, Alumna of the African Women's Leadership Institute (AWLI), Akina Mama wa Afrika (AMwA)
- Verónica Montúfar, Equalities Officer, Public Services International
- Chidi King, Branch Chief, Gender, Equality, Diversity & Inclusion, International Labour Organization
- Raquel Coello, Policy Advisor Macroeconomics and Global lead con Care, UN Women
- Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights
- Alexandra Haas, Executive Director, Oxfam México
A big thank you to our civil society partners who co-sponsored the Summit of the Future side-event with us:
Center for Economic and Social Rights, Global Initiative for Economic Social & Cultural Rights, Public Services International, Akina Mama wa Afrika, ActionAid, Care International, Feminist Macro-Economics Alliance Malawi, Young Urban Women’s Movement, with support from the Global Alliance for Care.
