🏛️ Public Policy as Care
Infrastructure
1. Background Context
- Traditional
Policy Orientation:
- Often
framed around control, order, efficiency, compliance.
- Built
from Enlightenment ideals of the rational individual, designed for
productivity, not vulnerability.
- Historical
Biases:
- Masculinized,
technocratic governance: hard power over soft systems.
- Care
relegated to private sphere, familial roles, or charity—not
public responsibility.
- Emerging
Critiques:
- Feminist
economics, Indigenous governance models, and social justice frameworks
argue that care is foundational, not secondary.
2. Core Concept
To reimagine public policy as care infrastructure is to
design governance that centers human and ecological well-being, relational
integrity, and systemic responsiveness.
This means:
- Seeing
citizens not just as voters or workers, but as beings
with interdependence and fragility
- Recasting
budgets, transport, housing, law, data, education as tools of care and
maintenance, not just regulation
3. Foreground Variations / Entry Points
|
Area |
Care-Centered Policy Frame |
|
🏘️ Housing |
Safe, stable shelter as a right—not speculative asset |
|
🩺 Health |
Preventive, equitable, proximity-based care networks |
|
📚 Education |
Nurturing growth, access, creativity—not sorting for labor |
|
🌱 Environment |
Stewardship, intergenerational equity, planetary healing |
|
🛣 Infrastructure |
Designed for accessibility, slowness, dignity |
|
🛑 Justice |
Restorative rather than retributive; focused on healing |
|
🧑🍼 Care Work |
Paid, protected, respected as economic backbone |
|
💻 Tech & AI |
Designed for support and augmentation, not extraction |
4. Current Relevance
- Post-COVID
Realizations:
- The
world’s functioning depends not on capital but on care workers, cleaners,
nurses, deliverers, teachers.
- Yet
these remain undervalued, unpaid, or invisible.
- Global
Movements:
- Care
Economy Alliances
- Green
New Deal for Care (UK, US)
- Buen
Vivir (Latin America): Policies rooted in collective flourishing
- Data
Gaps:
- Much
care work still unmeasured in GDP, leading to underinvestment.
- Climate
Policy Shift:
- Moving
from “war on climate” metaphors to “healing the Earth” language = shift
from domination to care.
5. Visual/Metaphoric Form
- Visual
Metaphor:
A city as a garden instead of a machine.
Or: a government as a mycelial network, responsive and nurturing. - Symbols:
- Hands
holding community
- Tree
with roots as care infrastructure (health, shelter, dignity)
6. Thinkers & Writings
- Joan
Tronto, Caring Democracy — foundational political ethics of
care
- Amartya
Sen & Martha Nussbaum — capabilities approach: policy as expansion
of real freedoms
- Berenice
Fisher — care as a species activity that sustains life
- Adrienne
Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy — fractal, adaptive models of
care-based leadership
- Vandana
Shiva — ecological and food justice as caring acts
- Silvia
Federici — unpaid care work and the hidden foundation of economies
- Audre
Lorde — “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is
self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
7. Infographic / Historical Cue Suggestions
🧭 Search prompts to
generate or find visuals:
- “Timeline
of care work valuation across economic systems”
- “OECD
comparison of public investment in care infrastructure”
- “COVID-era
shift in essential worker recognition by country”
- “Universal
basic services vs. universal basic income – policy map”
- “Map
of countries with paid parental leave, eldercare subsidies, caregiver
wages”
- “Budget
comparison: military vs. care sectors across nations”
8. Personal/Reflective Prompt
- What
systems around me would collapse if care disappeared for 48 hours?
- Which
aspects of life have been over-optimized but under-cared for?
- What
would it mean for a nation to parent, steward, or nurture
rather than govern?
9. Fractal & Systems Links
- 🌍
Climate repair as planetary caregiving
- 🧭
Governance as tuning, not control
- 🧑🔧
Infrastructure as collective maintenance
- 🕸️
Networks that distribute care, not just capital
- 🧵
Interdependence, not rugged individualism, as political design principle