The Care Economy Beyond GDP Paradigms

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Care is work, essential work that ultimately benefits everyone.

It should be the central principle of social and economic development around which societies are organized, and reflected in corresponding policies and metrics.

This offers an alternative and unorthodox view of the economy and social organization, driven by different values and priorities focused on environmental, human, and social well-being.

Growth, GDP, and the roots of the current polycrisis

The multidimensional and interconnected crises we are in – including economic, climate, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, debt, and care crises – are rooted in our dominant economic and political system. This system is based on coloniality, privatization, extraction, and exploitation for the purpose of creating wealth for a few. Economic growth, historically measured by gross domestic product (GDP), is central to this model and prioritized by governments at the expense of the global majority and care for people and the planet. Critically, a deep narrative has emerged around GDP and growth as overarching economic and societal aims.

Moving beyond GDP should not mean creating newer, more specific, or complementary metrics that preserve existing economic systems. ‘Beyond GDP’ gives us the opportunity to move away from growth-, profit-, and exploitation-driven societies and economies, to feminist systems change rooted in care, social justice, and gender equality. This implies transitioning to reparative and communal systems that shift power structures, recognize the interdependence between all living beings and the environment, and prioritize life’s sustainability, and the well-being of all persons, future generations, and the planet. These objectives should drive all policies, using metrics and indicators that value these aspects and center paid and unpaid care work. They must also address related issues of informality, decent work, and access to quality, universally accessible public services, infrastructure, and social protection as a right.

Towards care-centered economies and societies

Care, in a practical sense, consists of the activities undertaken to ensure the day-to-day physical, economic, social, and emotional well-being and development of persons. It includes providing or maintaining elements essential to human life, such as food, shelter, sanitation, cleanliness, health, education, and human relations. Care work comprises two overlapping activities: direct, personal, and relational care activities, such as feeding a baby or nursing an ill partner; and indirect care activities, such as cooking and cleaning.

Care work also includes environmental care such as – though not limited to – protecting and nurturing community commons, water bodies, forest patches, kitchen gardens, and tending to ecosystems.

Care can be unpaid, as in the case of work falling on women in households or communities, or paid, such as domestic work or labor in the care sector (health and education, among others).

Care is essential to our societies and economies and intrinsic to human rights. It allows individuals to be fed and kept clean. It also allows them to participate in their communities while providing a healthy environment. However, this labor is largely invisible, taken for granted, and undervalued and consequently poorly reflected in data and quantitative measures. It is widely considered women’s responsibility, with lifelong and intergenerational consequences for their well-being, personal development, freedom, agency, and financial status. The lack of essential infrastructure – such as clean water, energy, electricity, roads, transportation, and school meals – adds to the hours and drudgery of care work, especially in low-income countries (LICs) and underserved areas. Paid care workers also often suffer from low wages, exploitation, and precarious conditions.

Care is work, essential work that ultimately benefits everyone. It must be a public good, a human right, and a shared responsibility. It should be the central principle of social and economic development around which societies are organized, and reflected in corresponding policies and metrics. This offers an alternative and unorthodox view of the economy and social organization, driven by different values and priorities focused on environmental, human, and social well-being.

Under this framework, states, both national and local, are the primary duty-bearers in guaranteeing the right to care, with the private sector, communities, and households (including men) also playing a role in its social (re)organization. Care is also an investment with potentially high returns, rather than an expense to minimize. The cost of inaction is also significant, urging stakeholders to take concerted action toward building more caring societies.

Existing progress towards alternative metrics

There is global agreement on the importance of measuring unpaid care and domestic work through Time Use Surveys (TUS), as reflected in SDG 5 (gender equality). The latest progress reports against indicator 5.4.1, however, show that fewer than half of UN Member States (92 countries) have conducted at least one such TUS since 2000.

Several countries include unpaid care work as household satellite accounts of their national accounts, providing an estimate of the total economic contribution of unpaid care work. The 2025 revision of the System of National Accounts encourages nations to develop extended accounts that reflect the value of unpaid care work. However, these efforts are typically viewed as “complementary” to traditional growth metrics, and there is no evidence that they challenge prevailing economic paradigms or inspire the implementation of transformative policies.

Several new indicators, such as well-being metrics  and multidimensional poverty indices, aim to measure development beyond traditional economic growth. These frameworks typically assess factors like living standards, health, and the environment. However, most of these indicators fail to show that well-being often depends on care work and how this negatively impacts women.

Toward a feminist and caring systems change: Policy and practical recommendations

1. Transform narratives and build consensus on the imperative for care-centered economies:
   1. Recognize the centrality of care for our societies and economies and promote a new narrative on the purpose of the economy – serving the well-being of people and the planet.
   2. Establish that care work is work, that it must be recognized, reduced, and redistributed, and that care workers must be represented and rewarded.
   3. Commit to phasing out decisions based on GDP growth paradigms and indicators, and the exploitation of growth narratives for political gain.
   4. Leverage opportunities to establish multilateral frameworks and international agreements on the need to move beyond GDP and toward more care-centered priorities and indicators in spaces such as the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) and the Second World Summit for Social Development.
   5. Center feminist movements’ participation and uphold civic space in corresponding decision making.
   6. Expand and contribute to the work of the Global Alliance for Care as a global multi-stakeholder platform, to promote beyond GDP frameworks that center care.
2. Generate a dashboard of data, including indicators on care for people and the planet, to inform policy and decision making:

2. 1. Invest in rolling out gender-disaggregated data collection and statistics on paid and unpaid care work, particularly time-use data, as outlined in SDG target 5.4.
   2. Consider care-related indicators and data when developing other metrics relating to well-being and/or multidimensional poverty.
   3. Root knowledge production and policymaking in the demands and lived experiences of feminist and Indigenous peoples’ movements and communities to ensure a bottom-up participatory approach.

3. Situate this work within broader efforts to transform political and economic systems:

3. 1. Generate and invest in care policies and systems that seek to transform the social organization of care, and promote sustainable development and the well-being of all persons and the planet.
   2. Advocate for wider systems change that demands tax justice, debt justice, climate (finance) justice, trade justice, and reparations for colonial harms to ensure all countries, especially those in the Majority World, have the fiscal and policy space to realize equitable, rights-based, and care-centered economies beyond neoliberal and heterodox models.

WUNRN

The Care Economy in Beyond GDP Paradigms – SDG Knowledge Hub