A Feminist Economics for Latin America? Mapping the Region’s Care Policy Innovations

In Bogotá, Colombia, the municipal government has created ‘neighbourhood care centres’, in which public employees take on care-related chores (laundry and food preparation) while the carers use their respite time to attend continuing education classes, medical appointments, or even yoga classes. In Argentina, the recently created ‘housewife pension’ enrols those who primarily dedicate themselves to domestic activities into the national social security scheme. Across the region, countries like Chile and Uruguay are designing and implementing universal care systems, which shift the funding and provisioning of eldercare, childcare, and dependent adult care to the state. These initiatives are novel, with most appearing within the past five years. Framed as advancing human rights and sustainability, they employ the principles of feminist economics: namely, they assign a dollar value to unpaid care work. As such, they accelerate gender equality. How did such transformative policies diffuse so rapidly across the region? This paper theorizes and maps Latin America’s care policy innovations, drawing on policy documents and interviews with policy elites in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia. I begin by analysing Argentina’s pioneering effort to reimagine care: in 2023, the Argentine government asked the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to declare care a human right. The petition articulates three intertwined conceptions of the right to care: the right to receive care; the right to give care; and the right to undertake self-care. I then examine how new discourses around care as a human right align with arguments about building ‘caring economies’. Together, these discourses shape Latin America’s national and local policy initiatives related to care provision. I argue that while feminists long have articulated demands for greater investment in care, recent policy gains are due to elite feminists’ attainment of decision-making posts within economic and social development ministries. Femocrats play critical roles transforming discourses about rights into policy actions. The Latin American experience also offers potential lessons for feminist economic initiatives in the Global North. As policy developments from Bogotá to Santiago demonstrate, Latin American feminist elites are not seeking ‘just’ universal childcare, but ensuring the state provision of reproduction, including household chores and self-care activities.