Putting Care at the Center of the Global Agenda

The pervasive inequalities in the world limit the prospects of masses of people – persons as well as communities – of living full and satisfying lives. The deficit in wellbeing reflects a critical deficit in care, since the core of wellbeing is to be found in caring and receiving care.

All human beings have to be cared for; most human beings (notably women) are responsible for caring of others during long periods of their lives. Survival depends on being cared for. Social bonds depend on and express themselves through caring. 

Since care has been usually provided in the domestic economy, in the “privacy” of families and households, the deficit was and still is to a large extent invisible. Contrary to current trends in the political economy of the world implying privatizing previously public or common goods and grounds, the shift is towards conceptualizing care as a public good and as part of the collective societal responsibility. This move implies a paradigmatic shift in the way social sciences have conceived social practices and understood social inequalities – between regions of the world, between income strata, between age groups and ethnic lines, between men and women and among women themselves. Therefore, an integrated consideration of the institutions (states, markets, families) and the belief systems that regulate gender regimes, global migratory regimes, age patterns, ethnic and racial categorizations, can provide the clues that could guide public action leading to redress some of these central global injustices.

At the intellectual and scholarly level, this paradigmatic shift calls for revising and renewing conceptions of the links between micro and macro levels, of the private/public divide, of needs and emotions.