Introduction

Who do we care about and how? My aim has been to provoke new ways of thinking about the nature of gender inequalities in the context of contemporary globalisation and to enrich feminist legal scholarship so that it can better tackle global inequalities.

The book has deployed a framework that investigates the social and economic processes that link jurisdictions. These chains are governed by a range of discourses, which operate ‘horizontally’ in the terminology adopted by this book. Forms of governance, however, interact with the ‘vertical’ contexts within the particular jurisdictions. The domestic contexts construct gender relationships that both affect, and are affected by, the transnational governance discourses. This conclusion provides a summary of the way in which this plurality of discourses impacts both on understandings of gender relations and on the distribution of power. It then reviews the core conceptual framework adopted in this book through a consideration of three interrelated ways in which the concept of care has been used; as an activity; as a value; and as a method. I finish with some pointers on how to answer the question posed at the outset: who do we care about and how?