Care-full Community Economies

This chapter explores some of the common threads between Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) and Community Economies scholarship, highlighting the centrality of care work—women’s care work in particular—in the intellectual and empirical heritage of Community Economies Collective (CEC). It argues that an ethic of care has always been central to Community Economies thinking. Where political ecology focuses on the interrelationships between social, political and economic factors in shaping environmental change, feminist political ecology is widely understood as placing gender at the centre of the analysis. The gendered nature of much of this care work is crucial, and at the same time, Community Economies scholarship is arguing that the explicit acknowledgment of a broader understanding of ‘who cares’ is also important. A community economy is now being envisioned as something that incorporates a complex ecology in which human livelihoods, planetary well-being and care for the more-than-human are understood as interconnected and mutually dependent.