The Global South Feminist Perspectives on Macroeconomics conceptual framework aims to challenge orthodox approaches to macroeconomics by expanding the dialogue with alternative heterodox views, highlighting historical economic power relations between and within countries, centring inequalities and the sustainability of life, and going beyond traditional economic models and indicators. The framework integrates three key dimensions:
A holistic perspective focusing on the entire economic system to ground the basics of the capitalist relations of production and position different economic actors and their interrelationships, as well as the interdependence of production, reproduction, finance, and state economic participation and regulation.
The framework unveils the interaction of five key dynamics:
- Capital and Labour: The core of capitalist production, with labour exchanging work for wages and capital extracting surplus value from work. It highlights the need to understand the changing forms of these relationships as well as the dependency on unpaid reproductive work.
- The State, Capital and Labour: Far from being a neutral actor, the state is often patriarchal and captured by corporate interests. Its role in regulation, taxation, and social provisioning reflects existing power dynamics. But the state is both an actor that keeps the status quo, but could potentially drive transformation.
- Financial Capital, productive capital and real economy: Financial capital has evolved into a dominant force, subordinating real economies to speculative, short-term-profit-driven logics and expanding the key role of debt (strengthening its grip at the macro level on public debt while penetrating to the most micro levels of indebtedness in households). This has led to concentrated economic power and systemic instability.
- Global governance and financialisation: International Financial Institutions (IFIs) promote austerity policies that restrict national policy spaces, extract resources through debt repayment, and impose conditionalities, often at the expense of social welfare and equality. In the meantime, global financial actors increase their veto power on economic policies given the State´s growing dependency on private investment and financing.
- Human life and well-being, Capital and the Planet: Planetary boundaries are being pushed beyond sustainable limits by capitalism’s relentless drive for capital accumulation. This results in ongoing destruction of both life and the environment with nature being treated merely as a resource and technology viewed as a potential solution to current resource depletion. This dynamic threatens the entire system’s functioning and sustainability of life.
A feminist political economy approach to unveil the power relations driving the macroeconomy.
Each dimension is infused with social power relations, including gender relations and norms. This approach asks key questions: who owns what, who does the work, who gets the benefits, and how are those benefits used, for both market and nonmarket contexts, and for both production and social reproduction spheres. It highlights other forms of exploitation, such as debt bondage and land dispossession, especially in global South contexts, given that non-salaried labour dominates. It focuses on how patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and racism overlap to create and sustain inequality and exclusion. An intersectionality perspective is applied to identify, understand, explain and support the transformation of critical economic and gender power relations.
A historical perspective
A feminist perspective also recognises the importance of history in understanding the current situation. It tries to unveil how the past explains the current unequal relations between and within countries. It also highlights the way in which past experiences of conquest, domination, and colonisation, are recreated in “neo” ways. Economic structuralist theories as well as decolonial feminism helps to give clarity, from the past to the present.
Read the Conceptual
Framework here
