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SYMPOSIUM

The Monetized Economy Versus Care and the Environment: Degrowth Perspectives On Reconciling an Antagonism

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ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the question of how the current growth paradigm perpetuates existing gender and environmental injustices and investigates whether these can be mitigated through a degrowth work-sharing proposal. It uses an adapted framework of the “ICE model” to illustrate how ecological processes and caring activities are structurally devalued by the monetized economy in a growth paradigm. On the one hand, this paradigm perpetuates gender injustices by reinforcing dualisms and devaluing care. On the other hand, environmental injustices are perpetuated since “green growth” does not succeed in dematerializing production processes. In its critique of the growth imperative, degrowth not only promotes the alleviation of environmental injustices but also calls for a recentering of society around care. This paper concludes that, if designed in a gender-sensitive way, a degrowth work-sharing proposal as part of a broader value transformation has the potential to address both gender and environmental injustices.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Ulrike Knobloch for her outstanding support following the 2016 IAFFE conference in Galway. We are also grateful to Miriam Lang, Laura Meijer, Lisa Marie Seebacher, David Weihrauch, and Jan Zoellick, as well as our anonymous reviewers, for providing valuable feedback and support.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Corinna Dengler

Corinna Dengler studied Economics, Development Studies, and Socio-ecological Economics and Policy in Vienna. She is currently working as a research assistant and studying for her PhD at the University of Vechta in Germany. Her research focuses on combining feminist and ecological economics and puts an emphasis on making degrowth more feminist.

Birte Strunk

Birte Strunk studied Liberal Arts and Sciences in Maastricht and London, focusing on International Relations and Political Theory. She currently works as a teaching assistant at University College Maastricht, teaching in modules such as Theory Construction and Modeling Techniques or Philosophy of Science.

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