A new pact will center human rights, people, and the planet, grounding our social and economic relationships in a primary commitment to care. This new pact will reject economic growth as the dominant and only paradigm of development and understands that limitless economic growth and pursuit of profit are unsustainable for all forms of life. Building a feminist future necessarily entails transforming the world of social reproduction as a key step to dismantling the structural inequalities that prevent women from fully enjoying substantive equality and their wider economic, social, and cultural rights. Based on the shared analysis of members from a diversity of countries and backgrounds, we have outlined a series of elements (6Rs) that are necessary – although not exhaustive – to advance a feminist and human-rights-based pact of care, advance a feminist just recovery and build a feminist future:
- Recognition
- Measure and make visible the role of women and girls in the provision of unpaid care and its social and economic value.
- Transform normalized stereotypes that feminize and undervalue care.
- Reconceptualize care via a political vision that elevates life-sustaining actions.
- Redistribution
- Boost the capacity of the state to provide care.
- Ensure that the private sector’s policies and practices are conducive to quality, rights-respecting care.
- Redistribute care among women and men.
- Enable conditions for care provision from other social actors such as community-led care cooperatives and networks.
- Reduction
- Decrease the drudgery and time burden of unpaid care, especially for women living in poverty.
- Invest in time-saving technologies, care infrastructure and quality public services.
- Rights
- Recognize, respect, protect and fulfill care as a universal right.
- Realize substantive equality, addressing intersecting forms of discrimination.
- Expand, respect, protect and fullfil the rights of all care workers.
- Strengthen access to justice for paid and unpaid carers.
- Representation
- Ensure meaningful representation of paid and unpaid care workers and community-based care networks in the governance of care.
- Strengthen transparency and accountability in public and private care provision.
- Reframing the economy as a caring economy
- Transition to a regenerative economy that ensures care and substantive equality, prioritizing human rights and sustainability.
- Invest in social reproduction, expanding provision of and access to quality public services while countering privatization.
