Gender Justice and the Wellbeing Economy
Situating Gender Justice and the Wellbeing Economy within movements for a paradigm shift from a growth-driven economic system to an economy of wellbeing prioritizing care of the people and care of the planet.
The Programme is led by Professor Naila Kabeer (Director) and Dr. Ania Plomien (Deputy Director).
The Gender Justice and the Wellbeing Economy programme positions itself among the growing voices and movements across the world calling for a paradigm shift from the current growth-driven economic system to an economy of wellbeing, one that prioritizes care of the people and care of the planet. What distinguishes our work is the emphasis on gender justice as central to the processes by which this must be achieved. We share the concerns with the ever-rising levels of inequality and the looming climate catastrophe that underpin these movements, but we draw and expand on research that demonstrates how the underlying causes of ‘ill-being’ are bound up with processes that have bolstered and exacerbated long-standing gender injustices. Our main contribution to the wider voices and movements consists of evidence-based analysis advocacy and activism that makes the case for gender justice as foundational to creating a new wellbeing economy.
The inter-related nature of the injustices associated with rising economic inequality and looming climate catastrophe has come to the forefront of public consciousness: those at the bottom of the distribution of income and wealth have contributed least to climate change but are likely to suffer most. The relationship between the causes and consequences of these phenomena underpins arguments for a transition from a growth-driven economic paradigm to one that prioritizes wellbeing. Far less attention, however, is paid to gender injustice, to the persistent devaluation of activities associated with the care economy, and the implications of this and other gendered harms for the transition to a wellbeing economy. Our research programme aims to correct this blind spot by generating evidence-based arguments and advocacy within policy and activist pathways so as to ensure that gender justice is given prominence in the deliberations about the transition to a wellbeing economy.
The programme brings together an interdisciplinary core team and a wider network of scholars and activists in order to articulate the role of gender justice in the wellbeing economy through a focus on three thematic areas: an analysis of the problem, the conceptualization of alternatives, and the construction of an agenda for change.
The drivers of ill-being in the world today. This theme takes the work of Karl Polanyi on the destructive impact of deregulated markets and fictitious commodities as its starting point. It examines how this work has been built on and reformulated to make it fit-for-purpose in analysing the ill-effects of the current neo-liberal agenda of privatization, liberalization and financialization. It deals with the negative effects of this agenda on distributional issues, on natural resources and ecological services and on the key dimensions that are at the heart of human wellbeing across the world: food, water, shelter, health, education and the care provided and received within the home and outside it. The theme explores, in particular, the nature of the inter-relationships between gender injustice and these various impacts: how gender injustices can magnify these impacts but can also be exacerbated by them - bearing in mind all the time that gender itself is differentiated by class, location and social identity.
Conceptualizing the wellbeing economy. Along with concerns about growing manifestations of ill-being, there is now widespread recognition by both the policy establishment as well researchers and activists that GDP is not only an inadequate measure of national progress but its limitations have contributed to the problems we seek to address. Differing ways of conceptualizing alternatives have been suggested in its place, many discussed under the rubric of the wellbeing economy. This second theme assesses them for the notions of wellbeing they incorporate and the attention they pay to notions of gender justice. It also explores the extent to which they capture findings on wellbeing reported by smaller scale, empirical studies in different parts of the world. While the physical dimensions of basic necessities that are crucial for wellbeing may be reasonably similar across the world, what do these studies tell us about values and meanings attached in different societies to intangible dimensions such as justice, fairness and an ethic of care in different societies? Are these values and meanings similar within these societies or are there differences by class, gender and other axes of inequality? We need to understand potential differences more clearly if movements for change are to cross cultural boundaries and build alliances across the world.
Pathways to the wellbeing economy. The third theme focuses on the work of scholars, policy makers and activists who have been arguing for the transition from a growth-driven economic system to an economy that prioritizes human and environmental wellbeing. Certain policy debates recur in this literature, but they do not necessarily engage with the goal of gender justice. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi and Nancy Fraser, we see the regulation of market forces to serve the needs of the planet and people, the de-commodification of goods and services that are necessary for human wellbeing and the eradication of gender and other forms of social injustice as constituting the core of a just transition. The policy literature includes promising approaches for such an agenda:
- The case for the public provision of public goods, particularly those essential to human wellbeing
- Securing dignified livelihoods: rights, resources and social protection
- Financing the wellbeing economy: contributions and claims
- Democratizing the transition: accountable states and active citizens
The biggest challenge to achieving the kind of transition that can encompass wellbeing, justice and sustainability can be summarized in what has become a widely cited aphorism ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’. The crucial insight it offers is that the challenge we face can be traced to a failure of imagination on the part of the people who matter – not only those in power who have started to question the market-driven growth paradigm, but the wider society whose willingness and capacity can power the transition to a cleaner and fairer economy. Under this theme, we will draw on a broad range of efforts to bring about a transformation in the capacity to imagine that a different future is possible, to go beyond academic and policy discourse to the visions and imperatives outlined by those with the greatest stake in an alternative future and to the various ways in which they urge us to imagine this future. As Arundhati Roy wrote in relation to the last pandemic, crises have often represented moments in history when human beings are faced with the possibility of breaking with the past and imagining their world anew. We are now in an era of multiple and overlapping crises that threaten human existence as we have known it. We can choose a future that reproduces the injustices of the past but with far more destructive consequences or we can discard that historical baggage and, as she puts it, walk through lightly, ‘ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it’.
LSE Team
Dr Giulia Ferrari, Visiting Fellow, LSE Health
Professor Tim Forsyth, Environment and Development, Head, Department of International Development, LSE
Professor Naila Kabeer, Gender and International Development, Department of International Development and Faculty of III, LSE. Director, Research Programme on Gender Justice and the Wellbeing Economy
Dr Kasia Paprocki, Associate Professor in Environment, Department of Geography and Environment, LSE
Dr Ania Plomien, Associate Professor, Gender and Social Science, Deputy Head (Research), Department of Gender Studies and Faculty of III, LSE. Deputy Director, Research Programme on Gender Justice and the Wellbeing Economy
Dr Kate Steward, Project Manager
Core team
Dr Sajeda Amin, Senior Associate, Poverty, Gender, and Youth Program at the Population Council, Bangladesh
Professor Radhika Balakrishnan, Women’s and Gender and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers University, USA
Dr Sarah Cook, Head of Department of Economics, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China
Professor Deepta Chopra, Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex
Dr Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona, Director, Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Geneva
Haris Gazdar, Director, Social Science Research Collective, Pakistan
Professor Jasmine Gideon, Professor of Global Health and Development, School of Social Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London
Professor James Heintz, Andrew Glyn Professor of Economics and Director, Economics and Human Rights Programme, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Mass, Amherst, USA.
Dr Luiza Nassif Pires, Assistant Professor, Economics, State University of Campinas and Director, Research Centre on Macroeconomics of Inequalities, Sao Paolo.
Dr Munshi Sulaiman, Director of Research, BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, Bangladesh
Professor Dzodzi Tsikata, Professor of Development Studies, SOAS, UK
Professor Imraan Valodia, Professor of Economics (Climate, Sustainability and Inequality) and Director of Southern Centre for Global Inequalities, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
Network members
Professor Diane Elson, Professor Emerita, University of Essex
Dr Sara Farris, Reader in Sociology, Goldsmiths University, UK
Professor Linda Hantrais, International Inequalities Institute, LSE
Professor Jayati Ghosh, University of Mass, Amherst
Dr Shahra Razavi, Director, Social Protection Department, ILO
Professor Sharmila Rudrappa, Associate Professor in Sociology and the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Texas, Austin.
Dr Isabel Ortiz, Initiative for Policy Dialogue, University of Columbia, USA
Anam Pervez, Head of Research, OXFAM, GB
Rachel Noble, Senior Policy Advisor on Women’s Economic Justice, OXFAM, GB
Dr Jessica Woodroffe, Gender and Development Network UK
Past events
Drivers of ill being: crafting feminist pathways to the well-being economy
Workshop organised by the Gender Justice and the Wellbeing Economy Research Programme
Thursday 1 - Friday 2 May 2025, in-person workshop held at LSE.
Gender, wealth, and wellbeing: promising pathways to a just transition
Friday January 24, 2025
Professor Naila Kabeer (London School of Economics and Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy) and Dr Grace Mbungu(Africa Policy Research Institute) collaborated with the Robert Bosch Academy to organize a workshop for 20 academics, policymakers and civil society practitioners in order to explore the gender dimensions of the two major challenges of our time - rising inequality and accelerating climate change - within a unified framework. The Workshop Report details their findings.
Investing in women to advance gender equality in an era of polycrises
Webinar for International Women’s Day with UNU-International Institute for Global Health
Wednesday 6 March 2024, online event.
Speakers: Dr Stellah Bosire, Rajat Khosla,Professor Adeeba Kamarulzamanand Professor Naila Kabeer
Chair: Dr Johanna Riha
Gender, Policy and Human Rights: Rethinking ‘Progress'
Public event co-hosted with Department of International Development and Department of Gender Studies
Tuesday 5 March 2024, 4.30 - 6pm. In-person event. Graham Wallace Room, Old Building.
Speaker: Professor Radhika Balakrishnan
Chair: Professor Naila Kabeer
Journal Articles
- Chopra, Deepta and Sekhar, Resham (2025, forthcoming) ‘Invisible Work, Visible Malnutrition: A Feminist interpretation of ‘care’ to tackle nutritional inequalities through social protection’. Economic and Political Weekly
- Kabeer, Naila (2025 forthcoming) ‘A foundational asymmetry: gender, unpaid care and the labour market’ Oxford Review of Economic Policy Special Issue on The economics of care
- Elson, Diane and Jeff Powell (2025 forthcoming) ‘Engendering monetary policy’ Feminist Economics
Book chapters
- Cook, Sarah, Shahra Razavi, Silke Staab and Naila Kabeer (in press) ‘Gender and social policy in the Global South’ in A.Barrientos, M. Carnes, H. Kwon, H. Obinger, L. Patel and C. Schmidt (eds) Oxford Handbook of Social Policies in the Global South Oxford (OUP)
- Plomien, Ania and Schwartz, Gregory (2025 forthcoming) ‘The crisis of social reproduction provisioning: gender, class and migration in Poland and Ukraine’ in Jill Rubery, Valeria Insarauto, and Núria Sánchez-Mira (eds) Women in turbulent times. Crises, transitions, and challenges for gender equality. Routledge.
Blogs
- Kabeer, N. & Plomien, A. (2024) Placing gender justice at the heart of the wellbeing economy. LSE Inequalities Blog.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/inequalities/2024/10/02/placing-gender-justice-at-the-heart-of-the-wellbeing-economy/ - Kabeer, N. (2025)Women are seen as ‘saviours’ or ‘victims’ in climate change debates: why this is a problem. The Conversation.
https://theconversation.com/women-are-seen-as-saviours-or-victims-in-climate-change-debates-why-this-is-a-problem-244529
Videos
- Focus on the Global South (2024) Geopolitics and Globalization: A Feminist Reading and Critique from Southeast Asia. YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUJeQX5VGa0Professor Radhika Balakrishnan of Rutgers University speaks about the limitations and problems of a growth-oriented way of organizing the economy and society. She also discusses some systemic alternatives based on human rights, wellbeing, and harmony with nature that are already being put into practice.