McLeod Group guest blog by Fiona Robinson, February 10, 2021
This is the second of three blogs that the McLeod Group is publishing this week on the topic of the Canadian government’s Feminist Foreign Policy, which is currently being drafted.
“Care” is the new buzzword. As someone who has been studying the ethics and politics of care for over two decades, I find this remarkable. Care has always been decidedly unsexy, especially in its transnational contexts. For mainstream scholars of international relations, care was simply ignored – seen as irrelevant to the world of sovereign states struggling for power and influence. For feminists, it has often been viewed with scepticism: Why place value on the very thing identified as a key source of women’s oppression?
But the COVID-19 global pandemic has changed all this. Care has had a “discursive explosion”, as societies everywhere are confronted with previously hidden needs and demands of care – in households, hospitals, schools and long-term care homes – in short, everywhere that we live our lives. Suddenly, care seems important and valuable. But does the concept of care have legs? How can the buzzword be translated into meaningful policy for Canada, both domestically and in our feminist foreign policy?
Certainly, unions, advocacy groups and NGOs are taking care seriously. October 29, 2020 was declared a Global Day of Action for Care by the International Trade Union Federation. Two days earlier, Oxfam Canada hosted a webinar called “Invest in Care Now: Finding Solutions to the Care Crisis”. At that event, Canada’s Minister of International Development Karina Gould noted that “what COVID-19 has really highlighted is that our economy can’t function without the aspect of care”. Indeed, her 2019 mandate letter calls on her to “develop programming that recognizes, reduces and addresses the unequal distribution of paid and unpaid care work and that supports and protects the rights of paid and unpaid care workers to address a root cause of global inequality”.
This new attention to care is promising and suggests a shift. Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy, unveiled in 2017, overwhelmingly focuses on increasing women’s participation in the market economy. The stated aim is to give women and girls “equal opportunities to succeed” in order that they can be “powerful agents of change”. Such change includes “driving stronger economic growth, encouraging greater peace and cooperation, and improving the quality of life for their families and their communities”. Investing in women means helping them to access “economic opportunities and resources” to allow women and girls to “achieve the economic independence they need to take control of their lives”. Care doesn’t really feature in the policy, except as a pesky obstacle to women’s entrepreneurship and empowerment. Indeed, the neoliberal economic logic underwriting the policy is premised on the devaluing of care work.
If Canada now wishes to turn its attention more fully to women’s care work in its international assistance policy, it will be crucial to recognize that valuing and investing in care cannot be achieved simply by tacking it onto the existing neoliberal model, which sees care work only as a burden which must be cast off by women on their road to empowerment. This view fails to recognize care as a valuable human activity which makes an essential social contribution in its own right.
As Serene Khader argues, we tend to idealize women’s supposed emancipation in the “modernized” Global North compared to the drudgery and oppression associated with the lives of women in the Global South. To move beyond this false binary, we need a new way of thinking about “feminism”, one that starts not with women as the engines of economic growth – growth that ultimately may not benefit them – but with the collective value of care.
As I argued in 2019, a feminist ethic of care may offer a more sustainable and less contradictory normative basis on which to build a feminist foreign policy than the existing models of individual economic empowerment and rights. Care ethics do not prescribe a single model for the giving and receiving of care. Indeed, it challenges gendered and heteronormative assumptions and relations of power surrounding care. But it also emphasizes our shared vulnerability and interdependence, highlighting the centrality of relations of care to our ability to lead full and secure lives.
In policy terms, this means starting all conversations about international development and feminist foreign policy with care: how it can be best delivered, supported, funded. It means listening to all members of communities in order to understand their visions of the place and role of care in their lives and how these can best be supported by international agencies, governments and civil society.
Once we begin to think about feminist foreign policy through the lens of care, we begin to recognize both the ubiquity and importance of care in all areas of feminist foreign policy. Research on feminist peacebuilding has drawn attention to ways in which everyday practices of care not only sustain life through direct acts of care giving, but also help to build trust among and within communities. A care ethics perspective allows us to recognize the mundane but crucial range of peacebuilding activities that involve physical and emotional labour required to maintain and repair of relationships and communities. The aim of this research is not only to reveal how and why this work is gendered and devalued, but to recognize, value and support the caring work of rebuilding societies after conflict.
Crucial research like this is helping to chip away at our feminist preoccupations with individual economic empowerment while emphasizing the importance of care in the day-to-day lives of all households and communities. As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, Canada must recognize that a meaningful and relevant feminism depends on our shared commitment to care – in both our domestic and foreign policies.
Fiona Robinson is Professor of Political Science at Carleton University. She is the author of Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory and International Relations and The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security.
The first McLeod Group blog on Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy is available here. The third one will be published tomorrow.