Who Cares? The Role of Families, States, Markets and Communities in Care Provision: New Evidence from UNRISD Research

The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) is organizing two events in New York to coincide with the 53rd Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), to be held during March 2009.

The first event, a parallel event to the CSW, is to take place at the Dag Hammarskjöld Auditorium, United Nations Headquarters, New York, on Wednesday 4 March 2009, from 13.15 to 14.45.

Entitled, 'Who Cares? The Role of Families, States, Markets and Communities in Care Provision: New Evidence from UNRISD Research', the event will use new case study evidence from Tanzania, India and Nicaragua to draw attention to care arrangements and policies in low-income countries where widespread poverty, limited public budgets and weak state capacity place serious constraints on the functioning of both states and markets in welfare and care provisioning. For more information on this event please visit www.unrisd.org/events/gender/whocares

Following this, UNRISD is organizing a full-day conference (that is open to the public) at Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, to be held on Friday 6 March 2009, where key findings of the Research Project on the Political and Social Economy of Care will be presented. The conference will begin with keynote addresses delivered by two leading feminist thinkers - Joan Tronto and Elizabeth Jelin.

This event will consider questions such as; What form do care arrangements take in diverse developing countries? How do these arrangements contest or entrench existing inequalities (of class and gender, in particular)? Are families and households (in all their diversity) the only site where care is produced? Do we need to distinguish between different forms of familialism? How are states responding to structural changes and socio-cultural norms that shape care needs? Have issues of care entered the public debate? What forces have facilitated their visibility and to what effect?

For more information on this event please visit www.unrisd.org/events/gender/careconf or please feel free to attend in person.