The community field in the social organization of care

Abstract

The aim of this document is to explore the community sphere of care. A comparative analysis between Southern Europe and Latin America is proposed and, specifically, focused on the cases of Spain, Ecuador and Argentina. The text explores how the analytical frameworks that have approached the concept of the social organization of care have not stopped in characterizing its community pole, focusing on the transfer of provision between the State, the market and the family. It is argued that it is necessary to advance in the exploration of the community as an entity that provides care in the aforementioned territories. On the one hand, because the systemic crises of the last decades have led to the emergence of social movements that demand alternative formulas of well-being under the “paradigm of the commons” that transcend the institutionalized mechanisms and that demand greater citizen participation. This has been the case, both as a result of the financial crisis of 2008 and the austerity policies experienced in Southern Europe and Spain, and during the expansion of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the economic and health crisis that comes with it. In the first case, the strength of the "Movimiento de los indignados" has been an example of this expression and, in the second, the powerful resurgence of neighborhood-scale mutual aid groups that function under a collaborative culture visualize the relevance of the community to overcome vulnerability. On the other hand, because in Latin America, a region where community care initiatives have been relevant in the 80s and 90s, right now they are being questioned. In some cases, due to the development of public policies of character and, in others, due to the recent neoliberal turn of social policies. In addition, the document shows how new contributions are appearing in social research associated with these changes. In this way, from Europe, analyzes of "the common" and the "community" that revise the classic conceptualizations of the Welfare State have been reincorporated to the academic agenda. In turn, in Latin America, and from a gender perspective, new contributions are emerging that link care to other broader processes related to dispossession with respect to the territory and nature on which it is necessary to reflect.