A Gender Just EU Green Deal?

The EU’s Green Deal promises a transformation - committing to ensure that the transition to a decarbonised economy is ‘just and inclusive’, with ‘sustainability and the well-being of citizens at the centre of economic policy; and the SDGs ‘at the heart of the EU’s policy making and action’. This paper analyses the EU’s Green Deal to ask how transformative it really is. Feminist research which emphasises the importance of the social reproductive sphere, has already shown that the EU’s existing economic model entrenches intersectional inequalities (Heintz 2019; Nelson 2006; Mies 2014). We also know that several dynamics maintain this situation. Gendered and racialised assumptions help legitimate EU austerity policies (O’Dwyer 2018); women are erased as economic citizens in EU economic policy (Cavaghan and O’Dwyer 2018); the reproductive economy is consistently presented as an economic drain (rather than an economic foundation); and ignorance regarding the intersectional impacts of economic policy is widespread (Cavaghan and Elomaki 2022, Elomaki 2023). This leads us to expect that the transformative, inclusive, ambitions of the Green Deal are likely to founder. However to capture this we need to expand our concept of the economy further. FPE frameworks used to analyse the EU’s economic model so far, don’t equip us to analyse the Green Deal fully, because they ignore nature and our reliance upon it. They have also consistently restricted discussion of gendered impacts to those felt within the EU’s borders. Analysing processes of policy contestation leading up to the EU’s Green Deal, this paper draws on Ecofeminist political economy frameworks, which have highlighted the gendered and racialized power relations maintaining ecologically unjust and unsustainable economic practices that accumulate wealth to Global North countries (Battacharyya 2018; Brand 2022; Fraser 2021; Andreucci and Zografos 2022). These draw our attention to the relationships between humans and nature in the EU’s Green Deal; whether gendered social reproductive subsidies and colonial extraction have been problematised or maintained (Cavaghan and Elomaki 2022; Bhambra and Holmwood 2018; Hansen and Jonsson 2018); and whose well-being is included in the EU’s concepts of justice or welfare.