Making unpaid care and domestic work count: Frames, strategies and effects of new global partnerships

Despite its significance for unequal gender relations, unpaid care and domestic work (UCDW) has been conspicuously neglected in gender and development policy, perpetually focusing on women’s paid labour.

However, responding to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) on gender equality – clling on states and non-state actors to recognise and value UCDW – new global partnerships between public and private actors are now being formed.

As the first study of the emerging global governance of UCDW, this project follows three partnerships led by the UN, business experts and one NGO from global policy documents and sites of decision-making to Kenya where all partnerships are active.

Through a critical policy analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, the aim is to identify and compare the different ways in which UCDW is governed and assess the reshaping of gendered power relations.

Building on social reproduction theory, it develops a framework to analyse a) guiding policy frames i.e. economic growth or gender justice, b) strategies to mitigate, replenish or transform UCDW, and c) effects on the responsibility for and provision of care among public and private actors, civil society and households.

With a specific focus on the experiences of vulnerable groups, the ones most affected by the lack of care infrastructure, the study wishes to strengthen development partners’ awareness of the complexities of UCDW as they aim to alter it in alignment with the SDGs.