Feminist economics
and climate change

Women are playing critical roles worldwide in research and action on climate change. Yet there is another level at which gender has played a major role in getting us into this crisis. This is the way in which gender dualisms have structured our ways of thinking. In industrial Western civilization, for example, rationality and technology tend to be culturally encoded as “masculine” while nature and caring are encoded as “feminine.”

It is quite obvious how this thinking has affected my own field, economics. Starting at the time of the Industrial Revolution with its fascination with machinery, economists (nearly all male) suggested seeing the economy as machine-like, functioning according to physics-like laws. And that idea stuck. The mainstream of the discipline has been built upon ideas of powerful but impersonal competitive markets, individual autonomy, self-interest, and rational choice. A blind faith in measurement and mathematics as guarantors of objectivity round out the picture.

This approach, and its shortcomings, are readily apparent in the mainstream analysis of climate change and the policy advice it supplies. William B. Nordhaus, for example, received the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for his decades of work on models of the economics of climate change. In a recent working paper issued by a prestigious think tank, the following hard questions continue to be among the ones he and others have tried to finesse via technical assumptions:

• How should we regard future generations? Financial market interest rates are used to “discount” the future. The reasoning is that these reveal people’s preferences about present and future consumption – not just over the next few months or years, but infinitely and including all future generations.

• How much should we consider global problems of poverty and unequal hardship due to climate change? Well, since people disagree about that, it is said that objectivity is not possible. So economists leave that question for someone else to address.

• How can we respond to a crisis in which the very source of human life and livelihood is deteriorating rapidly? Nordhaus and others assume that economic growth will continue indefinitely.

In general, such analyses advise “go slow” policies for climate change mitigation and adaptation so as not to unduly slow economic growth. And such writings are not the mere ivory-tower scribbles of the socially or ethically impaired. They have influenced the recommendations of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Other mainstream economic studies have broken away from the Nordhaus approach, but usually in relatively minor ways. Even those few academics who see the need for “urgent action and radical change” still tend to think that economists’ main role is to devise “a diversity of models”.[1] I’m afraid I don’t see much promise in continuing attempts to capture the key aspects of highly complex and unpredictable natural and social systems within models based on a misleading mechanical metaphor.

Given that the masculinist and mainstream type of thinking was instrumental in fueling both the growth of carbon-emitting industry and the long-time (and continuing) neglect of its ecological consequences, it’s natural to look for alternatives. Many of us believe that responsibilities towards future generations and towards those who are impoverished or harshly affected by climate change (which they did not contribute to creating) cannot be technically erased. They are ethical issues that deserve society-wide and deep discussion. We see that environmental limits on economic expansion are real. We see the need for immediate and dramatic action. And we may believe that interdependence, generosity, cooperation, caring labor, attention to social and environmental limits, and problem-solving involving democratic discourse should be part of that alternative. These are, of course, gender-coded as the more feminine aspects of human experience.

It is fortunate that many scholars, writers, and activists take the crises in ecology and care seriously. But it is unfortunate that many also take the teachings of the economics discipline seriously. Believing that capitalist systems are as based on greed and competition as economists claim, such thinkers tend to reject them entirely and propose wholesale replacement.

Writer and localism advocate Helena Norberg-Hodge, for example, proposes “dismantling the economic structures” and working for a future in which there is “a flourishing of artisanal crafts and careful use of natural, place-based materials… Individuals would increase their creativity… People would lead rich and diverse lives shored up by webs of relationship.” Writer Myfan Jordan decries the “hyper-masculine machinations of an exchange capitalism that is destroying our planet” and imagines “a ‘(re)matria­tion’ of human culture” with a basis in gift (rather than exchange) relations.

New Economy advocates, however, tend to finesse the following hard questions simply by not discussing them:

• If economies all become local and artisanal, what will become of the large populations currently living in highly service- or export-dependent countries?

• New Economies are populated by people who all generously offer the products of their time and labor to each other and are able to work cooperatively and democratically with each other at all times. Where do these people come from?

• Some may answer the previous question by claiming that the New Economy itself will mold people in a cooperative direction. What evidence do we have that this works?

• How would we get there from here?

In general, the New Economy proposals are high on vision and low on practicalities.

In fact, what evidence we have about these tough questions suggest that realistic answers to them are quite grim. Populations in some areas would have to drastically shrink, by starvation, massive (and likely unwelcome) emigration, or draconian birth policies if people had to rely solely on local resources. And it isn’t that people haven’t tried to create New Economies in the past. Small communities based on utopian visions have grown up, run into problems, failed to spread, and ultimately disbanded many times in human history. People usually turn out to be more gnarly than the founders’ vision assumed. 

Lastly, given that the capitalist economy is envisioned as a huge, powerful, mechanical juggernaut crushing human vitality and community, it would seem that thoroughly taking it apart would be a huge undertaking. I’ve read lots of ideas about what it will look like once we get beyond that “dismantling” stage. But I can’t think of any way dismantling could realistically be accomplished, other than by total self-inflicted global collapse at great human cost.

Yet all is not lost.

Let’s take off the gendered, binary, male/female, either/or lenses for a moment and look at actual people and actual economic life.

If we investigate actual human beings without assuming they are either selfish or generous, we’d find that we are a bit of both. The best short way of expressing this that I’ve seen is Howard Margolis’ (1982) idea of “NSNE” which stands for “Neither Selfish Nor Exploited.” That is, most people will pitch in for those who are worse off or for the common good as long as they have enough, believe that they aren’t being duped, and see others pitching in, too. If those conditions don’t hold, we tend to lean more towards self-protection.

And let’s investigate actual organizations. Does “for-profit” really mean greedy and mechanical? Those who study businesses as organizations know that no business would last a day if everyone inside it were totally selfish. People need to cooperate to get things done. (Why else would there would there be so many meetings!) And while businesses do have to be able to pay their bills, the idea that profit must be maximized at all costs actually originated in economistic thought. There’s a lot more to businesses than their bottom lines. Meanwhile, it’s not true that people always behave better in small organizations (ostensibly) based on love, community ties, or public service. There is domestic violence within families. Small restaurants, laundries and the like that hire from within ethnic or immigrant communities are often sites of abusive labor practices. Some non-profits pay their executives ridiculously high salaries. Some “public servants” act more like kleptocrats. Humans are humans, wherever they are located.

Dualistic thinking actually accentuates the current climate change and care crises. Both those lost in economism and those lost in utopian dreams essentially say to current business executives and policymakers that it’s okay to keep on with “business as usual.” The economists do so because they ignore the crises. New Economy types often don’t even try to influence those with power, since they believe their decisions are inexorably driven by the capitalist machine. What if, instead, we said that business as usual is not okay. What if we banded together to demand that policy makers and executives act like ethical and responsible human beings, with awareness and compassion regarding their effects on the world?

A pragmatic way forward would be to start with where we actually are, and the economies we actually have. Economies actually are, and always have been, complex, human-populated, social organizations. Recognizing this we will, I believe, be able to think more clearly about what kind of system of provisioning we want and how we might make it productively, socially, and environmentally sustainable. Most importantly, when we think about how to get there from here, we can abandon the ideas of either statis or a huge leap and instead look at doable projects. 

What can you or I or we do today to enhance what is good, and discourage what is bad, in what we already have?

Notes

[1] N. Stern, J. Stiglitz, C. Taylor, The economics of immense risk, urgent action and radical change: towards new approaches to the economics of climate change. Journal of Economic Methodology, 29(3), 181-216, 2022.

This article is a short version of a paper that the author gave during the past annual conference of the International Association for Feminist Economics conference (Iaffe), which took place in Rome from 3 to 5 July 2024, and in which inGenere participated as media partner.