Global governance through the ethics of care: might care be the solution to global poly-crisis?

The dominant global systems, for centuries, have produced and reproduced ecosystems of fragmented and broken relationships, resulting in a poly-crisis, ranging from climate breakdown to extreme poverty. These vast global challenges have not been appropriately addressed by the dominant global governance models such as multilateralism. In this paper, using a five-dimensional feminist care ethics framework, I explore multistakeholder global governance (MGG) to question whether this alternative governance type is a more caring and effective approach in addressing global challenges. First, I theoretically construct the five-dimensional care framework, exploring the dimensions of social, political, economic, more-than-human, and epistemic care. This framework allows for theoretical interrogation of the ways that care might show up in global governance: which bodies are included or excluded, who is represented or ignored, who’s way of knowing is centered, and what economic activities are prioritized. Care ethics insists we question how we can justly live with those intersecting inequalities and harms, and still care for one another. Rather than assuming that all global governance participants are equal in the global arena, studying global governance from a care perspective gives a vocabulary and a framework with which to question power imbalances that arise and repair the plurality of worlds we share and live in. Second, care ethics seems to fall into a trap of its own design. Care ethicists argue that late-stage capitalism itself is the root to this poly-crisis, and only a complete system overhaul can restore care. This, however, renders any attempt at studying the system’s individual components hopeless. If we cannot study how and why care is present, erased or silenced within institutional arrangements, we risk getting stuck in idealizing a utopia without trying to genuinely understand and build caring global institutions. Thus, I explore a methodology that holds onto-epistemological plurality to include more-than-humans and different epistemologies, and pays tribute to a deeply embodied methodological approach to an empirical study of global governance. There are many different ways, from institutional to informal, collective to individual, that care is practiced even within the neoliberal economic system, but the question is – are they all futile?