Governance of national care provision through the European Semester

This paper analyses the governance of national care provision through the European Semester Country-Specific Recommendations (CSRs) in the context of the care crisis and multiple interpretations of the essence of this crisis. Although the provision and organization of care – in this paper broadly understood as public and private provision childcare, long-term care, healthcare and social services, as well as informal care – is in the competencies of member states, it has become a salient topic in the European Semester. Since health systems and other care services account for significant shares of national budgets, they have been an obvious target for the EU’s economic governance. At the same time, the EU has approached national care provision from the social investment perspective, through their role in ensuring labour supply and increasing human capital, and more recently from the perspective of social rights in the context of the European Pillar of Social Rights. Taking a feminist economics and political economy perspective that sees care provision – whether unpaid or waged and for children, the elderly or the ill – as crucial economic activity and a specific type of labour that cannot be fitted to the logic productivity and efficiency, the paper analyses the approach to care in the CSRs from the inception of the European Semester until present. Focusing on shifts over time, differences between forms of care, internal contradictions, and differences between member states, the paper aims is to understand how the EU, through the CSRs, aims to reconfigure national care provision and understandings of care, potentially contributing to the care crisis and the gendered and racialized inequalities it entails.