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Where does the project come from?
We believe that the economy, the market, the financial system and the premises upon which they are built are critical areas of feminist struggle. Thus, our vision for a just economy goes beyond promoting women’s rights and empowerment in the market, to evaluating the role of gendered oppressions in shaping economic arrangements and transforming these to ensure gender and economic justice.
Process
We are neither starting from zero, nor alone in this attempt to put forward feminist propositions for a just economy. Many of the propositions herein have been advanced or exist in practice within diverse communities challenging and resisting the mainstream market and growth-based economic systems.
It is also very important to note that there is growing awareness of the fact that micro solutions are not always the answer to macro problems, even if they represent important spaces for resistance and movement building and that there may be limitations to particular alternatives to address the injustices of the current capitalist system at a global scale.
Goals
However, feminist alternatives for a just economy are critical to create dents in the system and draw lessons for transformative systemic change. Here we cannot presume to offer a comprehensive nor a complete account on how to create a just feminist economic model, or even models. But we can, but rather draw from cross-movement dialogue with trade unions, environmental, rural and peasants movements, to articulate the propositions for the journey towards this vision.
What do we want to change?
The neoliberal model driving the global economy has repeatedly demonstrated its inability to address the root causes of poverty, inequalities, and exclusion. Neoliberalism, and has in fact contributed to the very creation and exacerbation of these injustices.
Characterized by globalisation, liberalization, privatisation, financialisation and conditional aid, mainstream development policies over the past 3 decades have wreaked havoc on livelihoods over the past 3 decades. These policies have also sustained a trajectory of deepening inequalities, gendered injustices, and environmental destruction that the world can no longer afford to endure.
While there are people those who assert that economic growth, facilitated by giving free reign to corporations and businesses, can sustain a tide that will (eventually) raise all boats.
However, the notion of development that has prevailed for the past decades, built for the most part upon the premise of limitless economic growth, is going through an ideological crisis.
The myth of economic growth as a panacea for our problems is being debunked.