Sustainability, Justice and Growth? Has the European Green Deal Fundamentally Changed the EU's Economic Model?

This paper draws on feminist and ecofeminist and political economy frameworks to ask whether the treatment of social reproduction and nature in EU Economic policy has changed after the European Green Deal. Feminist analysis of the EU’s economic policy before the EGD highlighted how it entrenched gender inequalities, apportioning disproportionate burdens and disadvantages on some actors, namely women and racially minoritised/marginalised people whilst simultaneously maintaining a ‘strategic silence’ (Bakker 1994) about these outcomes. These analyses consistently drawn on an expanded concept of the economy which identifies the social reproductive sphere as the foundation of the productive economy, premised on a reproductive subsidy (Heintz 2019; Nelson 2006; Mies 2014; Cavaghan and O’Dwyer 2018; Cavaghan and Elomaki 2022; Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas 2014). However, the feminist political economy (FPE) frameworks used to date to analyse EU economic policy, elide some of the most important economic relationships which the Green Deal rhetorically claims to alter – namely the role of nature and our reliance upon it. To fill this lacuna this paper draws on Ecofeminist political economy frameworks to analyse key EU economic policy documents (e.g. The European Semester, policy initiatives of the EGD). These frameworks eschew hierarchical distinctions between humans and non-humans normally assumed in mainstream economic policy, and throw our attention onto the hegemony of instrumental and exploitative epistemologies that elide the necessity of care and reproduction – not only in relation to social reproduction but also our natural world (Abazeri 2022; Battacharyya 2018; Brand 2022; Fraser 2021; Andreucci and Zografos 2022; Salleh 2020; MacGregor 2021). This expands feminist EU studies analyses of the EU’s economic model beyond the productive and reproductive economy to include non-human production, reproduction and sustainability. Findings show that despite some rhetorical shifts, economic epistemologies used in EU economic policy reproduce the same andro-centrism, instrumentality and unquestioned pursuit of growth that characterised EU economic policy before the EGD. This limits the likelihood that the EGD will yield any significant transformations in the harms and inequalities caused by EU economic policy.