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“Who cares about social reproduction in a time of climate crisis?” Reflections from environmental justice scholar Giovanna Di Chiro

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[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1592900783478{margin-right: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;}”][vc_column css=”.vc_custom_1592900766479{margin-right: 10px !important;margin-left: -10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]The enduring efforts by marginalized women across the world are sustaining community well-being in the face of the climate crisis, which is why their work of social reproduction is needed now more than ever. Professor of Environmental Studies Giovanna Di Chiro in her recent visit to the ISS spoke about the power of stories to turn our attention to the importance of social reproduction or life-making as part of “living environmentalism”. In this blog article, ISS Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development Wendy Harcourt shares some of Di Chiro’s reflections.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_single_image image=”28868″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]

Renowned scholar of environmental justice at Swarthmore College in the United States Giovanna Di Chiro visited the ISS on 12 June this year, where she presented a seminar titled “Social Reproduction in the Age of Climate Crisis”. In the seminar organized by the ISS Political Ecology research group, Di Chiro pondered the following important question: What would a just approach to ‘sustainability’ look like that supports ‘life-making’ in all its forms, even — or especially — in the wake of the ruins of capitalism?

Using a critical ecofeminist lens[1], she examined how neoliberal ‘green’ solutions[2] to the climate crisis have not taken seriously the material effects of embodiment and the capacity for communities (human and non-human) to accomplish social reproduction — that is, the capacity to sustain everyday life and to thrive into the future. I invited her to talk about this at the ISS, as her research insights are crucial for our ongoing collective efforts to address multiple, intersecting challenges and crises. In this blog article, I share some of her reflections.

The convergence of crises — and the convergence of struggles

Social reproduction risks are now intersecting with environmental crises, leading to the convergence of struggles for social reproduction and environmental justice. Giovanna Di Chiro’s work is inspired by women grassroots activists in the environmental justice movement in the United States who have been fighting for their survival and the survival of their children and families. These women activists have been seeking to stop the onslaught of toxic pollution from chemical factories, waste incinerators, and many other toxic assaults on their lives. In her research, Di Chiro has documented[3] how grassroots women leaders — who are largely poor and low-income Black, Brown, and Indigenous women — organize to build connections between environmental movements and women’s movements. These activists expose how the intersecting systems of hetero-patriarchy and racial capitalism have resulted in the poisoning of their air, water, and lands, and show how these have harmed their own reproductive health and the well-being of their communities.

Yet, despite decades of women’s environmental justice activism, the chances for everyday survival and possible futures for millions of people, and for billions of other species on the Earth, have gotten worse; we are all familiar with the horrible statistics of worsening climate disasters, the mass extinctions of plants and animals, and widespread violence and war. Adding to this the attack on reproductive rights in the US by the Republican right wing and the rise of neofascism worldwide, we see even more threats to social reproduction and survival into the future as it relates to environmental justice. Everyday survival is still a problem for many low-income Black and Brown communities in the US, and survival remains the first priority.

One example of the connection between social reproduction and environmental injustice is the recent decision by the Republican Governor of Louisiana to withhold millions in federal monies to repair the city of New Orleans’ decaying water treatment infrastructure (which is needed to prevent flooding, toxic lead leaching, and saltwater infiltration in the city’s drinking water due to rising sea levels in the Gulf of Mexico). He withheld this funding because New Orleans’s Democrat-controlled city government had refused to comply with the state of Louisiana’s total ban on abortion, which would require the city to arrest and prosecute low-income and poor women who seek abortions in the state.

Another example of the increased threat to social reproduction and its connection to environmentalism involves rising incidences of eco-fascist rhetoric that blames the “over-population” of immigrant bodies for jeopardizing the sustainability of our environment. In 2019, two years after Trump came into office and authorized anti-immigrant violence across the US, a 21-year-old white man opened fire at a busy Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, targeting the predominantly Latino and Mexican shoppers. He killed 23 people and wounded another 26. The shooter had earlier published a lengthy, online manifesto expressing his white supremacist, ‘eco-fascist’ beliefs, stating, “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion of Hispanics.” He blamed Latinos for overpopulating the country and taking away real Americans’ jobs and destroying the environment. This is a revival of an extremist environmentalist politics blaming the invasion and over-breeding of racialized bodies for the country’s downfall.

‘Living worlds’ to counter global injustices

Many of today’s intersectional movements engage in creating new stories about building what feminist political ecologist Diana Ojeda[4] calls ‘Living Worlds’: stories about how we must live and especially about how we must thrive in these precarious times. Indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer[5] urges us to work to change the world by prioritizing what she argued are the core features of building anti-colonial Living Worlds: raising good children, raising a garden, and raising a ruckus. They are ‘living environmentalisms’ of marginalized communities’ struggles for everyday life.

Di Chiro’s talk showed how social reproduction is at the heart of the environmental justice (EJ) movement. Social reproduction means not only care for children, families, and communities; it also means ensuring that you can breathe healthy air and drink clean water and that the places where you live, work, and go to school are free from toxic contamination. We learnt from her talk how sustaining everyday life should be at the heart of environmentalism and at the core of definitions of “sustainability.” In times of climate crisis and climate anxiety, it is important to understand how citizens can act and continue to resist, as well as flourish, in communities of care. Di Chiro’s pedagogical approach is, in itself, part of living environmentalism. She is among those environmental activists, scientists, and artists who write about what motivates them to act on social and environmental injustices, connecting their own personal stories to larger historical narratives and broader social and environmental issues.

References

[1] Di Chiro, G. 2017. ‘Welcome to the White (M)Anthropocene? A feminist-environmentalist critique,’ in S. Macgregor (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment. London: Routledge.

[2] Wichterich, C.  2015. ‘Contesting green growth, connecting care, commons and enough,’ in Harcourt, W. and I. R. Nelson (eds), Practicing Feminist Political Ecologies. London: Zed Books.

[3] See for example Di Chiro, G. 2015 ‘A new spelling of sustainability: engaging feminist-environmental justice theory and practice,’ in Harcourt, W. and I. R. Nelson (eds), Practicing Feminist Political Ecologies. London: Zed Books.

[4] Ojeda, D. et al. 2022. ‘Feminist Ecologies,’ Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Vol. 47, pp. 149–171.

[5] Wall-Kimmerer, R. 2015. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text]Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” accent_color=”#a80000″ css=”.vc_custom_1594895181078{margin-top: -15px !important;margin-bottom: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1719410637773{margin-top: 0px !important;}”]

About the author:

 

Wendy Harcourt is Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University in The Hague.

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Caring About Peace: Care as Inclusion and Transformation in Peacebuilding

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Drawing off interviews with peacebuilding practitioners working in Palestine, Sudan and Yemen, this blog considers how peacebuilding practices can be enhanced with a lens of care. How does centring care relations of interdependency impact what is understood as peacebuilding? How can decision making and participation become more inclusive? And what are the implications for the construction of Global North/South dichotomy informing humanitarian intervention?

Image by artemisgone/Pixabay

Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) sits with the trouble of understanding the significance and ambivalence of care by stating “care is omnipresent, even through the effects of its absence” (p. 1). The ‘absence’ of care is particularly visible during conflict, as care tasks may become more urgent and challenging. Likewise, care relations are severed when people die or become displaced, and numbers of injured people requiring care may increase (Robinson, 2011 p. 96). In the context of peace and conflict, some scholars argue that care, and the gendered power relations that go with it, cuts through social practices (Vaittinen et al., 2019, p. 3).

With this framing of care, my thesis research sought to explore how peacebuilding with a care lens can enable inclusion and strengthen extant situated caring practices. I explored this in conversations with peacebuilding professionals implementing programs under the Dutch NAP-IV, Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women Peace and Security (WPS), in Palestine, Sudan and Yemen.

Analysis of peacebuilding programs with a care lens

Across three country contexts, every conversation revealed how care relations are constituted in a lineage of unequal power structures – specifically, colonialism, patriarchy, and racism.

These conversations revealed how without explicitly considering people with care roles and their specific needs, peacebuilding programs inadvertently excluded people with care roles in their approach. This exclusion is in direct contradiction to the NAP-IV outcome of increasing women’s equal and meaningful participation in decision-making in peace and security processes. Moreover, excluding people with care roles – who may face multiple aspects of structural marginalisation – impedes upon their needs, rights, expertise and experiences shaping the discourse of what peace and security means, for whom, and how it is attained. This exclusion furthers the devaluation and marginalisation of people who care – and the role of care itself – in society. So, , what could embedding a care lens add to these programs?

Embodying caring values: attentive listening and responding to needs

Practicing caring values such as attentive listening, patience, humility and seeking to understand the context can support better understanding and response to needs of affected communities in peacebuilding programs. This can include asking ‘How are care relations disrupted by the conflict? Have sites of care (e.g. community spaces and homes) been destroyed in the conflict? How are gendered dynamics impacted by the conflict? How are marginalised groups impacted by the conflict? Whose needs are being met, and whose are not?’ This echoes the recommendations in the Peace Direct et al. Decolonising Aid (2021) report where practitioners advised INGOs to “listen, listen, listen”, and “act with humility” (p. 36).

Designing to include

In my conversations with peacebuilding professionals, I heard examples of listening and responding to needs in practice. Based in Sudan, Amina* spoke of advising colleagues in the program, “Always, I tell them that we need to do our listening before conducting any activity in the community. Just go to the community, listen from them directly. Listen for the women, listen for their stories. And after that, let us come and sit and think and try to know the kind of intervention that we need for this community”. This practice of attentive listening, utilising relational ontology and situated knowledge of the context, can be embedded in the needs assessment prior to program design and implementation.

Based in Palestine, Sahar* reflected on a lack of understanding of unpaid care work as a barrier to participation: “This is a huge burden that might prevent women from engagement and participation in public life in general … we are talking about women’s political participation and participation in decision-making process”.

A needs assessment must embody an ethics of care, and be attuned to structural barriers to participation. Practically, this entails specifying who does the listening (e.g., someone with existing relations to the community), who is listened to (e.g., marginalised communities), and identifying existing relations of care and seeking to strengthen these, while being attuned to how different forms of power exist and are distributed in society, impacting relations of dependency as mutual or exploitative.

Having a more comprehensive understanding of the specific needs of people in a conflict-affected community can support inclusive program design, such as providing childcare during program events and scheduling events in times and places which are not restrictive for people to attend. Addressing these barriers enables peace and security discourse to be more reflective of the lived realities, needs and aspirations of all people affected by the conflict.

 

Implications for humanitarian intervention

Thinking about peace with a care lens supports us to centre a recognition of interdependence across national borders, and challenges the construction of power within the longstanding Global North/South dichotomy in humanitarian intervention. A care analysis highlights the capacity and expertise of people who are situated in a conflict-affected context to understand and respond to needs of particular others, as such relations of giving and receiving care exist before, during and after the conflict. This framing aligns with the broader localisation agenda.

This does not suggest international actors have no role or responsibility in supporting conflict-affected communities. Ethics of care highlights the experience of interconnected needs, dependency and vulnerability transcending national borders, and is attuned to the historical and ongoing impacts of colonisation which influence whose needs are met, and whose are not. From here, the role of humanitarian intervention must be to strengthen local activities/approaches, and redistribute resources to do this, rather than undermine or overshadow local initiatives.

Everyday peace theorists contend that without a consideration of how care operates in peace efforts “it follows that various mundane practices of caring that are crucial in creating trust and peaceful conflict transformation are either taken for granted, or remain invisible” (Vaittinen et al., 2019, p. 3). As the conflicts in Sudan, Yemen and Palestine continue and civilian deaths increase every day, care relations are severed, strained and remade. Humanitarian intervention must seek to strengthen mundane, everyday practices of care in efforts to support and sustain peace that is by, and for, people situated in the conflict context.

References

*Note, interview participant names changed to maintain anonymity

Peace Direct, Adeso, Alliance for Peacebuilding and Women of Color Advancing Peace and Security and Conflict Transformation. (2021) Time to Decolonial Aid – Insights and lessons from a global consultation. Peace Direct, London. Available at: PDDecolonising_Aid_Report_Second_Edition.pdf (peaceinsight.s3.amazonaws.com) (Accessed 19 October 2023).

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) ‘The Disruptive Thought of Care’, in Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (ed.) Matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds. United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1-24.

Robinson, F. (2011a) The Ethics of Care; A Feminist Approach to Human Security. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Vaittinen, T., Donahoe, A., Kunz, R., Bára Ómarsdóttir, S. and Roohi, S. (2019) ‘Care as everyday peacebuilding’, Peacebuilding, 7(2), pp. 194-209. doi: 10.1080/21647259.2019.1588453 https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2019.158845 3.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Ebony Westman holds a MA in Development Studies, specialising in Peace and Conflict Studies from ISS (2023) and a MA in Gender Studies from Utrecht University (2017). Ebony is committed to intersectional gender advocacy and exploring this in the context of peace, conflict and care.

 

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