Fixing” the care crisis? A critical assessment of the EU’s policy approaches to care

We are currently witnessing a deepening care crisis, whose root cause lies in the persistently low material and symbolic value assigned to care work and to those who perform it. Policymakers have increasingly responded to the care crisis, as reflected in a growing number of public policies addressing childcare and long-term care provision, workforce shortages, and poor working conditions in the care sector. The EU has been an important actor in this regard, as seen in its Barcelona Targets (2002) to expand institutional childcare in the Member States and the more recent European Care Strategy (2022), which represents the EU’s most direct engagement with the topic of long-term care to date (Daly 2025). In this paper, we analyse selected policy documents related to social care between 2002 and 2022 to examine: (1) whether and how the care crisis is addressed in major EU-level policy documents; (2) which “solutions” to the crisis are proposed within them; and (3) whether these proposals hold any transformative potential. Regarding the latter point, we are particularly interested in whether EU policies intend or are likely to recognize, redistribute, and reduce care work for those who perform most of it (e.g., women, migrant care workers) and how these policies relate to ongoing processes of marketization, financialization and digitalization of care. Located at the intersection of social reproduction scholarship and feminist social policy analysis, the paper provides an in-depth assessment of whether EU policies on care possess, or develop over time, any transformative potential to tackle the root causes of the care crisis, or whether they represent mere “care fixes” (Dowling 2018), aimed at managing the crisis by offloading more care work onto marginalized groups while increasing market actors’ roles and visibility in care provision.