The role of care in the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility and national plans: A caring economy or more structural reforms?

Economic policies and the economic ideas and theories they rely on have tended to either ignore or devalue care. Whereas unpaid care has been next to invisible, paid care work has been undervalued and public services have been seen as a mere cost. Covid-19 crisis has been seen as a possibility to advance alternative, more gender-responsive economic models and understandings of the economy. Scholars, civil society actors and international institutions like the UNWomen have, in particular, advocated for the idea of a caring economy – an economic model that puts the wellbeing of human and the planet at its centre, recognizes the role of both paid and unpaid care and other reproductive work in the functioning of the economy and invests in social infrastructure. To what extent – and in what form – were these ideas integrated in European Union’s and member states’ Covid-19 recovery policies? Combining feminist political economy theories of social reproduction and feminist theories of care, this paper analyses, firstly, the role and constructions of care in the EU’s historic 750-billion-euro Recovery and Resilience Facility and in selected national recovery and resilience plans. Secondly, it traces funding allocated to investments in care and other social infrastructure and related reforms within the RRF and the national plans and assesses the quality and potential impacts of care-related investments related investments and reforms from feminist perspective.