What would an economy look like if it prioritized sustaining life rather than generating profit?
Across the world, communities are already answering this question through collective practices of care. From Indigenous women defending their territories to grassroots movements organizing food solidarity networks, these initiatives challenge economic systems rooted in extraction, exploitation, and inequality.
ESCR-Net’s new popular political education resource, Weaving Ecologies of Care: Communities’ Experiences in Cultivating Regenerative Economies, brings together members’ experiences and analysis to explore how care can become the foundation of more just, equitable, and regenerative economies.
From a Social Pact on Care to community-led alternatives
Developed in 2020 by members of ESCR-Net’s Women and ESCR Working Group, the Social Pact on Care emerged as a collective response to the systemic inequalities exposed and intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Pact challenges the historical devaluation of care and calls for a fundamental transformation of economies and societies. It recognizes care not only as paid and unpaid domestic work, but also as the collective labor of sustaining communities, defending territories, protecting ecosystems, and ensuring human rights.
Its vision is grounded in six interconnected principles: recognition, redistribution, reduction, rights, representation, and reframing the economy as a caring economy.
Five years later, this new resource explores how communities are putting that vision into practice.
Care as a political force: Experiences across regions
Drawing on experiences from ESCR-Net members and their communities, the document highlights how care is being organized as a collective response to structural injustice.
In Tanzania, women-led initiatives are combining sustainable agriculture, reforestation, collective childcare, and resource-sharing cooperatives to respond to climate impacts and shrinking public services.
In Guatemala, Indigenous women from Consejo de Mujeres Ix Nab’il understand care as inseparable from the healing of bodies, territories, and communities. Their practices connect ancestral knowledge, environmental protection, and collective resistance to extractivism.
In Honduras, the Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña (OFRANEH) has strengthened food sovereignty and community care through women-led kitchens, agricultural practices, and the defense of Garifuna territories.
In Palestine, women working with the Bisan Center for Research and Development are organizing informal solidarity economies, sharing resources, and transforming shelters into spaces for education and childcare amid displacement, restrictions on movement, and the destruction of essential infrastructure.
These experiences demonstrate that care is not simply a response to the failures of existing economic systems. It is also a means of building alternatives grounded in reciprocity, collective rights, self-determination, and solidarity.
Connecting care, climate, debt, and economic justice
The document also examines how care crises are inseparable from wider structures of economic injustice.
Austerity measures, unsustainable debt, privatization, and environmental destruction undermine public services and intensify the burden of care, particularly for women and marginalized communities.
Against this backdrop, ESCR-Net members are advancing a vision of regenerative economies that demands more than recognizing unpaid care work. It requires transforming the political and economic structures that determine whose labor is valued, whose rights are protected, and whose lives are prioritized.
This includes advocating for public investment in care, debt justice, gender-transformative climate finance, labor protections, and community control over resources.
A collective resource for political education and action
Weaving Ecologies of Care builds on reflections shared during the October 2025 webinar, ongoing exchanges within the Women and ESCR Working Group, and the Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) initiative of ESCR-Net’s Community-led Research Hub.
Rather than proposing a single model or definitive framework, the document brings together diverse perspectives and practices to support continued collective learning, political reflection, and organizing.
It makes visible the transformative alternatives communities are already cultivating while opening space to deepen connections between struggles for gender, economic, climate, and social justice.
Explore the resource and learn how communities are building economies that put care for people and the planet at their center.
