Care-full community economies

In this era of human-induced environmental crisis, it is widely recognised that we need to foster better ways to sustain life for people and planet. For us – and other scholars drawing on the Community Economies tradition – better worlds begin in recognising the diverse and interconnected ways human communities secure our livelihoods. Community Economies scholarship is a body of theory that evolved from the writings of geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham, which, for more than 30 years, has inspired others (including the three of us) to rethink economy as a space of political possibility. In this chapter we explore 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). We argue that an ethic of care has always been central to Community Economies thinking. The question of how to transform our economies in order to allow human and more than human communities to ‘survive well together’ places care for planetary companions at the heart of our endeavours (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). In this chapter we focus, however, on the role of care work within Community Economies thinking. For us, transforming the economy begins with the feminist project of recognising and revaluing a broader network of care-relationships that are central to all ecologies and economies. We argue that scholarship must begin with making visible the care work involved in transforming the economy for people and planet. Here Joan Tronto’s definition of care is helpful.