Presentation short abstract

Care Municipalism could link care, welfare transformation, and post-growth politics, transforming institutions to build care commons and envisoning earthcare infrastructures that reconnect human and planetary wellbeing, grounding transitions in shared responsibility and lived practices of care.

Presentation long abstract

In Caring Democracy, Tronto explained why market fetishisation fails to achieve equity in basic social provisioning and made a case for social citizenship based on the universal right to care and democratic redistribution of care responsibilities. Meanwhile, emerging literature on eco-social and careful political economy unpacks links between care, equality, and climate. Care services represent forms of work compatible with a low-carbon economy, requiring little to no extraction of environmental resources. Freeing our time for care aligns with decentring economic growth as society’s compass. Nevertheless, scholarship on welfare transformations, public policies and post-growth has remained largely unconnected, and degrowth postulates have often been criticised for being addressed in the void.

Care Municipalism has the potential to bridge scholarship on welfare transformation, post-growth, care, and social change, fostering provision beyond environmentally and socially harmful productivism. This concept and political project envisions a concrete articulation of local political community through public and autonomous spaces and institutions for commoning care. Based on exploratory interviews with those fostering change in this direction in European and Latin American contexts, this study explores existing and possible frameworks of public–communitarian collaborations and instruments to democratise care, such as care councils. Moreover, it envisions earthcare infrastructures capable of dissolving the ontological separation between “social” and “ecological” care. Recognising Nature’s caring work, they would foster reconnection between human and planetary wellbeing. In doing so, Care Municipalism emerges as a strategic pathway to ground post-growth transition in lived democratic practice and shared responsibility for sustaining life.