ABSTRACT
A decade ago, a major concern among feminist international political economists was the almost complete lack of attention paid to the relationship between global restructuring and social reproduction in development policymaking. Structural adjustment policies (SAPs), which reflected then-reigning Washington Consensus principles of expanding market forces and constraining the role of the state, led to inefficiencies and gender inequities by failing to acknowledge the important role of reproductive labor in the economy (Bakker 1994). Cuts in government support for social reproduction were advocated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and other international financial institutions (IFIs), based on the flawed belief that women would take on the newly-privatized care tasks formerly supported by the state. In this context, as Diane Elson put it so well, women’s supply of non-market labor was assumed to be “infinitely elastic” (Elson 1998: 71). But, as women were increasingly joining the paid workforce around the world, they were carrying a “double burden” of income and carework (UNDP 1999: 79), and the tensions between these often increased to near to breaking point. Yet, despite the growing severity of this care crisis, mainstream economists and policymakers remained resistant to taking issues seriously regarding women’s social reproduction, in general, and unpaid carework, in particular, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, preferring instead to emphasize the ways in which integration into the paid labor force was all that was needed to empower women in the Global South (Wood 2003). With the rejection of the strict free-market approach signaled by the recent
turn toward a post-Washington Consensus on development, however, policy frameworks have changed. Now, the care crisis is included among the social concerns being addressed in the post-Washington Consensus framework, and more emphasis is being placed on recognizing and supporting the economic activities associated with social reproduction, particularly the unpaid reproductive labor done in the household. This change reflects, among other things, the influence of many feminist theorists, practitioners, and activists who brought attention to the negative effects of global restructuring regarding the
tensions of paid work and reproductive labor on families, communities, and economies. By the turn of the century, even the originally defensive World Bank acquiesced that its own former restructuring policies had increased women’s reproductive labor burdens and needed to be rethought (World Bank 2001a). Consequently, the need to correct these effects by taking social reproduction explicitly into account has now been addressed in a host of World Bank country poverty reduction papers and country gender reviews. Additionally, categories of unpaid caring labor that were previously ignored are now included in the UN System of National Accounts, and used to measure economic well-being and guide policy at the national level in many countries, and specific policies aimed at resolving tensions around paid work and reproductive labor within households have been included in a number of recent aid programs in Ecuador, Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil. Given this recent policy shift, it is useful to examine how the recognition
of the crisis of social reproduction has led to changes in the gendered impact of global restructuring. Does the inclusion of aspects of social reproduction, such as unpaid carework, signal a turnaround toward more feminist aims – as major development institutions such as the World Bank suggest? Has the emergence of new languages and frameworks for understanding social reproduction reversed what Janine Brodie (2005) identified as a central issue in gender and restructuring, namely the erosion of gender-based citizenship in terms of claims on the state for support? How have these recent changes in the discourse of gender and development created new opportunities, or new obstacles, for achieving the goals of gender, sexual, class, and other forms of justice? Part of the answer lies in understanding how the recent addition of repro-
ductive labor to the equation in development policy is related to broader shifts in neoliberal governance. The conditions that led up to the postWashington Consensus in development policy, including the need to respond to critiques of structural adjustment by activists, as well as the growing evidence that the old regime had led to economic instabilities and had failed to deliver the goods on growth, challenged but did not derail the project of neoliberal restructuring. Instead, it gave rise to new frameworks that focus not only on markets, but also on transforming social institutions and social practices. This post-Washington Consensus discourse of development represents a movement away from the economistic, growth-centered rhetoric of the earlier era. It highlights improving health, gender equity, and environmental sustainability alongside economic growth, imagines a role for the state in institution building, and articulates a broader set of goals and instruments than the narrow framework of the 1980s had allowed. While this shift certainly does open up some space to advocate for positive change, the World Bank’s recent social turn could also be viewed as evidence of the adaptive capacity of neoliberalism itself. If the first phase of neoliberalism under the guise of the Washington Consensus was a process of “rolling back”
the previous Keynesian and social welfare regimes, recent efforts are aimed at “rolling out” and engineering a deeper set of neoliberal transformations (Peck and Tickell 2002: 380-8). David Mosse (2005: 5) refers to these attempts as a “new managerialism in international development” that focus not only on economic growth and finance, but also on the reorganization of society in order to enhance efficiency defined in the most neoclassical of terms. Flawed institutional structures and individual behaviors are now viewed as key constraints in the system. So, contemporary discourse and policy on social reproduction aim to transform institutions, such as the household, community, state, and legal system, to introduce not only marketization, but also self-reliance, self-empowerment, and individual responsibility (Hindess 2004). Thus, new efforts to address the care crisis often seek to transform institu-
tions and individual behavior to be in line with neoliberal goals of expanding market capitalism and creating self-responsible neoliberal subjects. A variety of projects that take the social seriously aim to re-engineer the behaviors of individuals in developing economies through institutional change that renegotiates the boundaries and identities of private and public, productive and unproductive, market and non-market. Thus, the recent increased attention to social reproduction in the household and attention to carework, which was previously deemed private and relatively unproductive non-market labor, should be viewed at least in part as a process in which feminist concerns about carework have been “circulated, interpreted and reinscribed with alternative meanings” (Naples 2003: 91) in these emerging frameworks. The mainstreaming of unpaid reproductive work into development offers an example of how feminist aims can become governmentalized in new projects of neoliberalism.
