Focus: (Re)Productivity: Sustainable Relations Both between Society and Nature and between the Genders

Citation:

Biesecker, Adelheid, and Sabine Hofmeister. 2010. “Focus: (Re)Productivity: Sustainable Relations Both between Society and Nature and between the Genders.” Ecological Economics 69 (8): 1703–11.

Authors: Adelheid Biesecker, Sabine Hofmeister

Abstract:

The paper is embedded in the multiplicity of discourses concerned with a viable, sustainable development of society and its economy. It makes a case for a mode of economic activity geared to systematically integrating production and reproduction processes. Its starting hypothesis is that the persistent, constantly changing and expanding crises that weigh so heavily on modern societies – above all the ecological crisis and the crisis of reproductive work – have their common origin in the separation of production from reproduction constitutive for industrial modernity. A reformulation of the category of (re)productivity – the idea of the unity of and at the same time the distinction between production and reproduction in the economic process – could set the stage for us to review today's crisis phenomena, relocalize problems, and in this way to develop new solutions for them. A sustainable society would be in a position to grasp, and shape, the economy as a (re)productive regulative system, with economic space constituted consciously as a socioecological action space.

Keywords: production, reproduction, sustainability, (re)productivity, social ecology

Topics: Development, Economies, Ecological Economics, Gender, Women

Year: 2010