The concept of a green economy as proposed at the Rio+20 Conference has been rejected by a broad range of civil society organizations, including feminist movements because they believe that such a »green economy« will not achieve the drastic decline in resource use that is required to reduce CO2 emissions or stop the loss of biodiversity and the overall destruction of our eco-system.
Furthermore, the concept is criticized for being largely gender-blind with a strong reliance on green technologies and market mechanisms, while the economic model continues to rely on unpaid and underpaid care work, primarily performed by women.
Hence, the multifaceted debates on care and sustainability have not yet succeeded in building a bridge between these two topics. In contrast to a greener economy that maintains the economic structure and profit-making capitalist logic of the existing system, feminists are stressing the need for structural changes in the economic system with an emphasis on integrative and distributional aspects of sustainable development.
The main argument is that the sustainability of a new economic system will depend on converting the whole realm of reproductive forces into central pillars of economic thinking and acting.