For the latest installment of the Critical Conversations series — devoted to deep, thoughtful conversations around dimensions of a gender-just transition — we spoke with Thokozile Madonko, feminist economist and public educator, whose work on care economies, public services, and gender-responsive budgeting, particularly in the Southern African context, offers powerful insights for climate justice.
In this conversation, Thokozile challenged dominant economic models that sideline care work, whether paid or unpaid, and calls for an anti-capitalist, feminist approach to the just transition. She connected the dots between austerity, inequality, and climate, showing that care is not peripheral to climate policy, but its very foundation.
At a time when fiscal austerity is resurging and care systems are under strain worldwide, Thokozile’s reflections illuminate how feminist economics can guide us toward a more just, democratic, and grounded future, one that serves both people and planet.
The transcribed interview below has been edited for length and clarity. Watch the video of the full conversation.
WEDO: Why is care such a central issue in climate justice, inequality, and feminist economics? And what drew you to focus your research and career on care work?
Thokozile: I think one of the most important aspects of feminist economics is that it’s grounded in asking: whose labor counts, and what should the purpose of economics be? Part of that is looking at how we reproduce. The very way in which we exist as a species is determined by the laboring work of many people, predominantly women, because of the way we’ve sectioned out responsibilities, as well as patriarchal norms and standards.
Care has extended beyond caring for each other to also caring for nature. There’s a strong body of feminist and eco-feminist research showing the connection between caring for each other and caring for the planet. Care needs to be included in a conversation about the just transition because it is the foundation of what it means to be human.
Care becomes a central issue when we talk about a changing climate or biodiversity loss, and the way in which we engage in our very ability to eat, gather water, sleep, turn on the lights, drive cars, give life to our economies, etc. It is based on this very unacknowledged, generally underpaid, or low-paid, care work — caring for each other and the planet.
Research shows that women are the shock absorbers of events like drought, biodiversity loss, floods, and so forth, and that they take up the responsibility of caring, in terms of the actual impact of that shock. For example, having to look after a loved one after fires because of smoke inhalation, having to walk further to gather water, or having to care for people who are sick because of air pollution. We see that there’s a profoundly unequal impact of climate change, particularly for women.
This is why as feminists, we’re concerned. It’s about power, and it’s about the inequalities that are perpetuated because women are generally lower paid. They’re not able to go into the job market because they’re having to look after loved ones, look after their environment, walk further to get the water or gather wood, and so forth. This perpetuates the kinds of inequalities that we currently see in society.
Feminist economics unpacks and gives evidence to what we intuitively know is happening through research on questions of who bears the cost of climate change, climate shocks, and biodiversity loss. This gives us an insight into saying what we need to do about adaptation, mitigation, reparations, polluters, and so forth.
We see that adaptation can end up exacerbating inequalities if it’s not done properly. For example, land grabbing or farmers having to move their crops in the Sahel closer to water puts them in the way of migrating herdsmen, which then causes conflict to arise. Then you’ve got people being killed, and women again being the shock absorbers.
There are many examples from around the world of why we need to ask the questions: whose labor counts under climate shocks, and what should be the purpose of this kind of economic thinking in the context of climate change?
WEDO: How do you think about the relationship between the following two economic frameworks of care: the push to make care work more recognized and supported as another form of work under capitalism — like advocating for better pay, unions, or recognizing it as green jobs — and the cultural and social roles care plays beyond the economy?
Thokozile: In terms of the tension around how we talk and think about care and counting care, I like to defer to Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism, in which she really highlights that if we are serious about counting care, then it has to be an anti-capitalist pursuit. Not all feminists are anti-capitalists. They want to be able to have a green capitalism that then counts care in particular ways and that ensures that women, just as men, are paid in the same way. We have this language around women’s empowerment, and it all becomes part of the market.
That tension is profoundly ideological and political. I put myself squarely in the anti-capitalist camp. Drawing on Marx and Marxist thinking about domination, exploitation, and expropriation, and as Nancy Fraser talks about, even care itself is exploitation and is appropriated under capitalism. She has an extended definition of capitalism: that capitalism is not purely an economic manifestation but a social one. To dismantle that requires us to come back to what it means to live, work, and be in this world in ways that are just and based on mutual trust and love.
bell hooks’ concepts of love become very important when talking about nature, as well as each other. It’s very difficult when you’re in very strong neoclassical, mostly male-dominated spaces, talking about the just transition to start saying, but what about the fact that we need to love each other and love the environment? Instead, we have to get into the weeds and say: are we gathering the data? Do we know how many hours women work outside of their paid employment to take care of the home? What does that look like? We want to see what that unpaid care burden is and what it costs in the system that we work in, because that’s what economists, and particularly classical economists, understand. They want the “business case,” to put it crudely.
It’s important not to forget that this work, for me at least, and for many eco-feminists, critical feminists, Marxist feminists, should be a profoundly anti-capitalist space. One in which we begin to think about how we live and be in ways that enable us to live responsibly, to treat the environment, animals, plants, and everything with respect, and give them the identity and sovereignty that they deserve.
We’re not at a loss for options of alternatives. It’s just that those alternatives are not amplified in the academy, research, and policy. It comes back to saying, let’s count care beyond capital.
WEDO: What does a well-functioning care economy look like to you? When we call for dismantling oppressive systems like capitalism, patriarchy, and racism, and talk about centering love, care, and eco-socialist values, what are we proposing to take the place of those systems?
Thokozile: That’s such an exciting question because visioning is such a beautiful thing that we don’t have enough time to really reflect on. We’re often fighting the battles, and we forget to think about what those futures look like and what it could mean. At its core, it would be the dismantling of patriarchy and racist extractive systems. To do that, we need to re-learn what democracy looks like and what it means to engage in it. Bringing in a rights-based lens to a democratic space that is profoundly anti-capitalist, that is not based on domination, subordination, racism, racial capitalism, or extractivism.
I would always argue that it’s in the democratic process of coming together and meeting each other in our spaces and recognizing at our core the basics of equality, what equality means, what freedom is — freedom from, freedom to, freedom to be. That will then provide a better way of understanding how we live with each other and the land, and find ways to provide for each other.
When thinking about it from an African perspective, it’s also about sovereignty — so we have the ability to grow our own food, manage our own resources, and trade in ways that enable everybody to benefit, as opposed to the extractivist imperial mechanisms that we have at the moment. At a global level, you want to see something like a global commoning, a global democratic process, a UN that actually works for everyone. At a national level, a mirroring of that, where you don’t have big money involved in politics and economies based on extraction, but economies based on un-centering growth and centering other indicators, like health and wellbeing. When we talk about degrowth, it doesn’t quite work in the South African or African context because you’ve got energy poverty and huge amounts of water scarcity. We do need certain amounts of growth, but it’s a different kind of growth to enable people to benefit more sustainably from those kinds of investments.
At a very practical level, if I were talking to the Minister of Finance for South Africa, I would say: We want a universal basic income grant where everybody is covered. At the moment in South Africa, from ages 18 to 59, you do not have one, and if you don’t have a job, a disability, or a child, you have no access to support. And we have almost a 41% unemployment rate, which is up to 79% for young people in this country. So that would go a long way to provide support and enable people to adapt to economic and climate shocks. With COVID we saw this to be true, because they introduced a grant to support that group, and it has played an enormous role. They should just universalize it and make it a permanent feature to support people. It would be a climate-friendly solution.
It is also important to see social infrastructure (health, hospitals, clinics, schools, public transport, etc.) as an investment rather than a cost. We’re under fiscal consolidation austerity, and they’re cutting nurses, teachers, and doctors. And those are green jobs. They’re very low on the polluting scale, and they are predominantly jobs that are for women. So you would be addressing the gender and climate issues, as well as unemployment and reclaiming the commons, which is the provision of public health and education.
At the moment, our debt portfolio is crowding out our ability to spend on and invest in health and education. So we need to think about one of the calls coming out of Finance for Development and as part of the G20 platform: the call for a debtors club so that all the low- and middle-income countries that are affected can come together as a bloc to negotiate with creditors. Currently, there isn’t the power, even though they’re the global majority. They suffer under enormous pressures due to the cost of that debt, which then crowds out their ability to pursue their developmental agendas, their climate requirements in particular. So they’re not in a position to handle a climate shock like a flood or a fire, because there isn’t the money to repair what is damaged.
I think that would be one practical way to go from love right down to what a care economy could look like. We need to have a fundamental shift in the way we engage with each other, which has got to be anti-capitalist, anti-extractive, non-discriminatory, and non-sexist.
WEDO: In global negotiations around the just transition, a big challenge is figuring out how to pay for it, who will pay, and what kinds of shifts in our economic systems need to happen. How do you see budgeting as a tool for advancing a just transition? What do you think people often misunderstand or overlook about public budgets in these conversations? What should we know about how budgeting shapes what’s possible?
Thokozile: The most important thing you need to know about budgets is that they start with political choices and they end with political choices. And they are far too important to leave up to economists. I’m quoting Thomas Piketty there, I think. We need to democratize and fully familiarize ourselves with fiscal policy. There’s lots of big words: monetary policy, fiscal policy, inflation, headwinds. It’s a language in and of itself. Demystifying economics and the discipline of economics is absolutely critical because, as Clara Mattei has said in her book, The Capital Order, the technocrat has taken over and has convinced us that budgets are a technical exercise and not a political exercise. When you read a budget document, be it for your city or your country, that is a political document, and it’s telling you about the winners and the losers. When I’m doing trainings on budget literacy, I always like to say that it’s like a good murder mystery. You can figure out who’s been taken out and who’s been doing the taking out. This cutting of budgets, now called fiscal consolidation and defined as austerity, is my focus area.
What I would really like people to understand is that it’s critical to engage in your country’s budget process and, at the very least, to demand budget transparency. Transparency and access to information around budget information are key, before we can even start talking about how to engage with finance ministries to develop better budgets or about gender-responsive budgeting. You need the information in an accessible format.
To me, the interesting thing is that most of the time, budgets don’t tell us whose labor counts. The research that we do helps us see the impact of expenditure, revenue, and tax decisions. We know regressive tax most impacts low-income, working poor households, particularly women. That story is often not told in the official documents. We need alternative budgets and alternative conversations around budget information, and that’s where advocacy becomes so important.
The beauty of feminist economics is that it offers a vision where care is treated as a public good, and demands a particular kind of budgeting that isn’t currently happening in many countries globally. I think the most important thing is to talk about is fiscal accountability — to demand fiscal accountability and to demand transparency so that we have good budgets that really serve both people and planet.
WEDO: The cycle of growth and recession is often treated like an inevitability, with austerity presented as the only possible response. How can we challenge that narrative?
Thokozile: There’s multiple ways to define austerity. I borrow heavily from Clara Mattei — she talks about the austerity trinity: fiscal, monetary, and industrial austerity. She shows that the way austerity has been implemented historically is actually not cyclical. Her research looking back at post-World War I, shows that even though there was this expansion of the welfare state, there was also very strong austerity talk and the tightening of the belt. And in fact, she talks about how austerity also doesn’t make a distinction between fascism and democracy. She compares the democratic United Kingdom and fascist Italy, and how economists in the UK were envious of Italian economists because they could do more. They could discipline their populations faster and more quickly through violent means. Austerity, in this understanding, is a mechanism for restoring order within the capital order. It’s baked into capitalism’s logic. To think of an alternative to austerity, then, you have to think of an alternative to capitalism. Capitalism depends on ideology. It depends on people not being fully aware of their situations.
In South Africa, we were told a universal basic income grant was impossible. Then COVID hit, and suddenly, overnight, they introduced what is almost 99% a universal basic income — they just didn’t make it universal. In the U.S., there was the great resignation, where people stayed at home and got their checks and were like, why do we need to go back to work under these terrible conditions of extractivism?
It is not surprising that we’re seeing a fascist backlash globally. Clara’s work would say this is just part of the course. Essentially, this austerity is just being used to discipline the masses. I could say the same in the South African context. In 2012, when we ramped up our austerity policy, there was a huge set of political campaigns in the country around better working conditions for miners, access to higher education, and national health insurance. There was huge political pressure to have these put in place. What did we see happen? In the wake of this, I think 42 mine workers were killed, austerity was implemented, and South Africans were told to do more with less. Literally, that was what the National Treasury put in their official document in 2013 when the budget got passed. They said, we now have to do more with less, which is typical austerity, because who is doing ‘the more’? It is women who are the shock absorbers with these budget cuts.
I’ve been fortunate to work with the Budget Justice Coalition in South Africa, which is a movement of civil society activist organizations that have been pushing for a gender-responsive, socially responsible, climate-friendly budget that actually responds to the needs of the majority as opposed to supporting the few, which is what happens under austerity.
The alternatives to austerity are about claiming the commons, claiming public services, and reclaiming and signaling that health, education, water, public transport, and energy are not for the market. These are things that should be social, democratic, and equally distributed in ways that meet people’s needs.
