Care and Equality: Rethinking Measurement and Monitoring for Local Governance

Care must be understood as a structural principle for rethinking development, equality and democracy. Within this approach, care is conceived as a foundational dimension of social organisation rather than as a sector of economic activity or as an instrument for supporting labour market participation. This conceptual shift is the starting point of the paper “Care and Equality: Rethinking Measurement and Monitoring for Local Governance” by ARCO Researchers Caterina Arciprete, Federico Ciani, Andrea Ferrannini and Maria Nannini that contributes to the 7^th Global Report on Local Democracy and Decentralization (GOLD VII) in the Economies of Equality and Care by UCLG – United Cities and Local Governments. Together with this shift, authors also call for a corresponding evolution in the way care is measured and monitored. To support this change in mindsets, authors provide several Policy Recommendations for international organisation and UN System, for National government, for Local governments and CSO, associations and movements.

In their paper, authors analyse how the distribution of care responsibilities across households, public institutions, markets and communities becomes materially observable in cities and territories. At the same time, they demonstrate how the local level is where innovative responses flourish.

As a matter of fact, several local governments are already developing care-sensitive forms of governance, measurement and institutional experimentation that operationalise the core principles of the 5R framework—recognising, reducing and redistributing care work, while progressively strengthening its reward and representation.

Authors focus their local level analysis on the experiences of Buenos Aires, Bogotá and Barcelona which illustrate different but complementary pathways for embedding care within public governance. Building on these empirical insights, they advance two main propositions:

• First, it is crucial to measure care at the local level.
• Second, measuring care requires a multidimensional and layered methodological approach. No single instrument can capture the complexity of care system.

Why is it crucial to measure care at local level?

Care is inherently local and local governments are uniquely positioned to shape care ecosystems because they operate at the scale where services are delivered and everyday life unfolds.

Conventional measurement frameworks remain largely anchored to GDP-based metrics, which are designed to capture monetised economic production but systematically overlook many of the social and ecological processes that sustain collective well-being. Large parts of care activities remain statistically invisible within the dominant accounting frameworks. Understanding care requires moving beyond national aggregates and examining how it is structured and sustained within specific local contexts.

Which are the available tools for local care measurement?

The Care Diamond offers a useful analytical lens for this purpose. It conceptualises care as a co-produced process sustained by four interconnected pillars: households, the public sector, the market and the non- profit/community sector.

The design of the care diamond should not be conceived as the search for an optimal or universally “best” configuration among households, public sector, market and community. Rather, it is a process of dynamic and political negotiation, evolving in response to demographic, economic and social change.

A multidimensional framework is needed, especially if capable of capturing distributional effects, service quality and accessibility, the gendered division of unpaid work, institutional capacity, and long-term sustainability. Authors propose a comparative overview that includes care pillars and tools for care measurements.

Policy Recommendations for National Governments

National governments should formally recognise care as a foundational dimension of social reproduction, equality and wellbeing, and progressively move toward rights-based care frameworks. This means going beyond fragmented sectoral measures and adopting national care strategies or systems that clarify responsibilities, guarantee minimum standards, and create stable mechanisms for financing, coordination and accountability. Where appropriate, countries should also advance legal recognition of the right to care, to be cared for and to care for oneself, in line with the broader regional and international shift toward care as a human right. Some Latin American countries (ex. Chile) have recently advanced care laws or national systems in that direction.

National governments should also incorporate care more systematically into their statistical and accounting architectures. Because many of the core tools for measuring care, such as time-use surveys, satellite accounts and household production accounts, are typically produced at national or regional level, national statistical systems have a decisive role in making care visible. This implies institutionalising regular time-use surveys, strengthening care satellite accounts, improving disaggregation by gender, age, income, territory and household type, and ensuring that data can be downscaled or translated into forms usable by local governments. Without this effort, local authorities remain responsible for governing care without an adequate evidence base.

A further priority is multilevel coordination. National governments should create stable frameworks for collaboration between ministries, statistical institutes, regional authorities and municipalities, so that care measurement is not fragmented across disconnected institutions. This includes shared indicators, interoperable administrative systems, common metadata standards, and mechanisms for co-producing local diagnostics. It also requires sustained technical support for municipalities, especially smaller or less-resourced ones, to institutionalise monitoring systems and turn data into actionable policy tools.

National governments should also enable structured collaboration between local governments and universities, civil society organisations, feminist networks and community actors. In many territories, these actors already possess the analytical capacities, situated knowledge and social legitimacy necessary to gather, interpret and mobilise care data. Stronger legal and financial frameworks should therefore support local partnerships for research, participatory diagnostics, evaluation and experimentation, rather than treating care data as a purely administrative function.

Policy Recommendations for Local & Regional Governments

Local and regional governments should treat care measurement as a core governance function, not as an optional add-on. This means embedding care indicators into planning, budgeting, service design and evaluation, and ensuring that measurement captures both supply-side and demand-side dimensions of care. Territorial diagnostics should combine administrative data, spatial analysis, time-use evidence where available, and qualitative or participatory tools capable of making visible relational, cultural and community-based dimensions that are often missed by standard datasets. The cases of Bogotá and Buenos Aires show that dashboards, maps and monitoring platforms can support planning and accountability, but also help frame care as a shared public issue rather than a private burden. Barcelona adds an additional lesson: monitoring should also recognise commons-based and community forms of care, not only formal services, if local governments want to capture the full ecology of care within their territories.

Local and regional governments should not act merely as passive recipients of externally defined frameworks and visions of care, often rooted in Western-centric assumptions. Rather, the local level should be the space where care measurement systems are actively reinterpreted and reshaped to reflect plural worldviews, diverse social realities and context-specific practices. This requires particular attention to the experiences and care arrangements of migrant communities, marginalised groups and indigenous populations, ensuring that measurement frameworks are inclusive, context-sensitive and capable of recognising a plurality of ways in which care is organised and sustained.