Care Policy Across the Americas: Convergences and Divergences

The summer 2025 issue of Social Politics features articles exploring care policy across the Americas.

Guest co-editor Cynthia Cranford and author article Pat Armstrong are both members of the Care Economies in Context Canada team.

Table of Contents

Care Policy Determinants and Effects: Convergences and Divergences Across the Americas | Cynthia J Cranford and Flavia Marco Navarro

Feminist framings and networks as care policy determinants

Framing Care in Global and Regional Policy Spaces | Silke Staab

The Human Right to Care in Latin America: Legal Conceptualization, Social Demand, and Public Policy | Laura C Pautassi

Actions for Care: A Canadian Approach | Pat Armstrong

Between Activism and Academy: Lobby and Advocacy About Care in Latin America | Flavia Marco Navarro

School Meals, Policy Protagonism, and the Politics of Care in the Americas | Sarah A Robert and Jennifer E Gaddis

The effects of multisectoral care policies

Toward a Caring Society? A Framework for Analyzing the Impact of Early Childhood Policies Based on Chile and Uruguay | Carolina Pereira Tokarski, Ranna Mirthes Sousa Correa, Stephanie Natalie Burille

Unpaid Work in Uruguay: Between the Commitment of a Care System and the Setbacks of the Pandemic | Natalia Reyes and Soledad Salvador

Impact of the Multifactorial Crisis on Food Security, Care, and Quality of Life of Older People in Cuba | Claudia González Marrero and Elaine Acosta González

Occupational Transitions among Direct Care Workers in the United States | Janette Dill, Aimzhan Iztayeva, Carrie Henning-Smith, Bianca Frogner

Citation

Care Policy Across the Americas: Convergences and Divergences (Guest editors: Cynthia J. Cranford and Flavia Marco Navarro). Social Politics 32 (2, Summer): 240-265.  

Abstract

This special issue contributes to scholarship on gendered policies by engaging interdisciplinary conversations, intersectional analyses, and global approaches in four ways. First, we analyze care policy determinants alongside care policy outcomes through a feminist political economy framework. Second, we focus on less studied meso-level determinants of social policies: feminist framings and feminist networks that connect global, regional, national, and local levels. Third, we analyze the effects of multisectoral care policies, including childcare and care for aging and disabled people and ranging from institutional care to home-based domestic work. Fourth, we bring new insights from Latin America together with those of North America, and from researchers situated in universities, policy spaces, or both, using multiple methods to analyze convergences in global care policy determinants alongside divergent effects across and within countries.