Sandra Ezquerra and Elba Mansilla publish 'Economics of care and municipal policy: towards a democratisation of care in the city of Barcelona'

The report Economics of care and municipal policy: towards a democratisation of care in the city of Barcelona is now available online. It is the result of the research process carried out jointly by the lecturer in the Faculty of Health Sciences and Welfare, and the director of the UNESCO Chair in Women, Development and Cultures at the UVic-UCC, Sandra Ezquerra, and Elba Mansilla, a member of the cooperative The invisible city), who are both members of the Alternativas en Femenino team. This study, and the process that accompanied it, has led to a series of proposals, recommendations and actions included in the Government Measure for the Democratisation of Care (2017-2002).

The project addresses the challenge of defining the areas that enable the development of a feminist public policy aimed at transforming the current social organisation of care. One of the main contributions of this study is to establish a feminist conceptual framework for the democratisation of gender justice and care, and at the same time to establish analytical and operational tools that contribute to the design, implementation and assessment of a transformational policy on care.

The study defines two central areas for intervention: recognition and valuation of the centrality of the care in the sustenance of life and the economic system as a whole, and the need to socialise responsibility for care across a larger quantity of social agents, in order to distribute the overall work involved across more agents and resources, as very often care falls to a very small number of people in the family environment. The report also proposes two broad-based themes: the empowerment of providers and recipients of care, and the reduction of the (poor) social division of the social organisation of care from an intersectional perspective.