The travels of an exotic bird: The transnational trajectories of Venezuela’s constitutional recognition of the value of unpaid work

Abstract

The 1995 Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA) established a global norm to recognize the economic value of unpaid care work across the world. In 1999, Venezuela became the first of three South American countries to enshrine a similar norm with its Constitution in its Article 88. I argue that despite the temporal proximity of the two events and the global significance of the BPfA, the global norm only served partially as a tipping point for Venezuela. Taking an analytical framework that underscores the role of norm-takers, this article demonstrates that other, national, regional and transnational interactions led by national actors in national and regional arenas were as important as Beijing ‘95 for the development of Article 88.

Keywords

Care ideas norm diffusion unpaid work Venezuela

National governments committed to recognizing the economic value of unpaid care work at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. According to the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA), the value of unpaid work was to be measured through the creation of satellite accounts linked to the System of National Accounts (SNA). Just 4 years later, Venezuela was the first of three South American countries (followed by Ecuador and Bolivia in 2008) to enshrine the value of unpaid care work in Article 88 of its Constitution (Beccera Moro, 2011), while also guaranteeing the right to social security to homemakers. The value of unpaid care work was subsequently adopted as a regional concern featured in the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) conferences (2007, 2010) on women’s rights.

In this article, I argue that Venezuela has acted as both a norm-taker and a norm-maker (Acharya, 2004) by bringing forward the notion of unpaid care work’s value at the national, regional and transnational scales. The significance of domestic politics in this process has been established elsewhere (Elfenbein, 2015; Espina and Rakowski, 2005, 2010). In contrast, this article highlights the role of regional and transnational conversations in the emergence of global and national norms. The genealogy of Article 88 reflects the non-linear and often fragmented, national, regional and transnational trajectories of a set of ideas before they are framed as a policy issue at the national level. This article unearths the way national actors contributed to, and benefitted from, debates in the regional and transnational spheres in ways that facilitated the emergence of a national norm that established the value of women’s unpaid care work. The story of valuing unpaid work in Venezuela illustrates the role of national and regional actors in the creation of global norms, such as BPfA.

While Beijing ‘95 partially served as a tipping point for valuing unpaid work in Venezuela, feminists in Venezuela sought to raise the issue of the value of unpaid care work in national, regional and transnational spheres since 1975. In addition, several regional processes had been advancing a similar policy agenda for at least two decades prior to Beijing. These processes involved the communication of ideas inter alia through regional meetings, as well as through the participation of Venezuela’s epistemic community in global research processes such as those related to the Human Development Report (HDR) of 1995.

The first section of this article outlines the methods used and locates my positionality in relation to the Venezuelan experience. The next section sketches the theoretical framework I draw upon in order to understand ideas and their travels, as well as why they matter. I then examine the history of the ideas that contributed to the drafting of Article 88. The last section discusses the significance of national, regional and transnational paths that ideas follow before they are brought into policy. The article concludes that ideas travel in often fragmented, non-linear and contentious ways before becoming norms, and that diverse actors play an important role in their diffusion. This conclusion is an invitation to expand the historical scope, the set of actors and scales to be considered in the study of global norm-making processes. It points to the significance of contextualizing how international norms are mapped onto national contexts in ways that complement and often go beyond the more conventional internalization phase described by Finnemore and Sikkink (1998). This is a relevant contribution which highlights the normative agency of the national and regional spheres, particularly of countries in the global south that are often considered peripheral in the making of global norms.

Methodology and author’s positionality

This analysis draws on documentary analysis of primary sources that have received little academic and political attention, such as International Labour Organization (ILO) and ECLAC Conference Proceedings and policy papers from dating back to 1979, as well as policy papers produced by the Central Bank and different incarnations of gender equality mechanisms in Venezuela. I also examined written testimonials and other works written by some of the main actors involved in the events that culminated in the recognition of the value of unpaid care work. In addition to a review of secondary sources that helped to illuminate the historical analysis, I triangulated the data with interviews and personal communications with key actors involved in the struggle to recognize the value of unpaid care work.

I conducted five in-depth semi-structured phone interviews and exchanged personal email communications with eight key players. Informants were selected on the basis of their scientific contributions to the quantification of the value of care work in Venezuela and/or to their leadership in pushing for its legal recognition. Two were actively involved in delegations that represented Venezuelan civil society organizations in the World Conferences on Women of 1985 and 1995. Three were also involved in political organization, lobby and advocacy during the Constituent Assembly of 1999. Two were key players in the developing statistical measurements of the value of unpaid care work. While conducting this research, I exchanged written communications with Mercedes Pulido de Briceño, a key political figure who promoted the recognition of unpaid care work in the country between 1978 and 1994. I was, however, unable to interview her due to her untimely death. It was also not possible to reach two other central actors, such as Nora Castañeda and Blancanieve Portocarrero, who passed away in 2015 and 2010, respectively. In those cases, I drew on their written testimonials, academic work and on interviews with some of their peers during the Beijing and constitutional processes.

It is important to acknowledge that I was an active participant in policy and political discussions of valuing care in Venezuela between 2005 and 2012. During this period, I acted as an independent consultant, public servant and women’s rights activist.

Theoretical framework

Ideas are crucial vehicles to shape policy imagination (Béland and Orenstein, 2013). As Béland and Orenstein (2013) argue, ideas ‘shape the understandings that underpin political action and the rationale and purposes of organizations and policies’ (p. 127). In order to transition into a norm, an idea needs to be incorporated into the political agenda of powerful actors. These actors, then, are able to effectively frame ideas in ways that fit into legislative agendas (Béland, 2005), or – as in the Venezuelan case on 1999 – into a constitutional process.

Ideas travel across space, as well as among social groups and institutions, before reaching policy spheres. Ideas are carried by diverse actors that do not necessarily share the same interpretations, represent the same interests or work in concert. Ideas carried by these actors travel transnationally and within national borders, involving diverse institutions across geographical and disciplinary divides. Finnemore and Sikkink incorporate part of these travels in their norm life-cycle framework. For them, international norms are internalized through a linear process that begins with norm emergence or a tipping point when a norm is adopted internationally. A ‘Cascade Effect’ follows, when an international norm goes through international socialization or diffusion. Finally, the norm life-cycle process reaches the ‘Internalization’ phase, in which the norm is incorporated into domestic politics (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998).

The importance of transnational interactions in policy-making processes has also been advanced in the context of welfare state development and social policy, more generally. In that context, Orenstein (2008) argues, ‘major changes in welfare state structure cannot be explained without reference to transnational actors and their policy campaigns’ (p. 7). For him, policy ideas do not translate in identical ways in each national context: ‘transnational policy does not affect all countries equally, nor all policy areas’ (Orenstein, 2008: 178). In other words, the pathways of policy-related ideas are not linear, and domestic politics and society matter in the way ideas are translated into policy (Zwingel, 2005).

Acharya (2004) proposes ‘a framework for investigating norm diffusion that stresses the agency role of norm-takers’ (p. 240). Such a framework pays attention to the agents involved in adapting norms to national polities, a process of contestation and translation through which the ideas are transformed. While continuing to acknowledge the significance of transnational norm-making processes and actors, authors such as Acharya (2004, 2014, 2016), Orenstein (2008) and Lopreite (2012) draw attention to the importance of the national sphere, and, more specifically, to the agency of countries in the global south as norm-takers and also as norm-makers.

As we shall see, three specific sets of actors placed a critical role in the processes that led to Article 88: the Venezuelan women’s movement, femocrats and an epistemic community of economists and national accountants. By women’s movements, I refer to the social movements organized around women’s rights. This movement historically included women from different political parties, feministas autónomas – as independent feminist activists refer to themselves – and members of civil society and grassroots organizations (Friedman, 2000; Rakowski and Espina, 2010). By femocrats, I mean feminist individuals in governmental institutions. Haas (1992) defines epistemic communities as a ‘concrete collection of individuals who share the same worldview (episteme)’ (p. 27). Epistemic communities share a set of normative and principled beliefs, causal beliefs, notions of validity and a common policy enterprise.

All three sets of actors involved in the Venezuelan debates were nationally based but internationally linked. All were involved in domestic political conversations about women’s and labour rights, as part of state institutions, social movements, universities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). At the same time, these actors were often linked to regional and transnational conversations central to the development of what emerged as Venezuela’s constitutional recognition of the value of unpaid care work. Their transnational links were often enhanced by their collaborations with international organizations and/or their participation in the four World Conferences on women held in Mexico (1975), Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985) and Beijing (1995).

Valuing unpaid care in Venezuela: the messy trajectories of an idea

This section presents a chronological account of the multiscalar and often fragmented travels of the idea of valuing unpaid care work that led to the emergence of Venezuela’s Article 88. It first sets these conversations in the transnational context, describing relevant global discussions that contributed to the emergence of BPfA. After highlighting the participation of Venezuelan delegations in Beijing ‘95 and their potential effects on Article 88, the article moves on to national and regional conversations about the value of unpaid care work led by Venezuelan femocrats, epistemic communities and feminists since as early as 1975. Because the idea of valuing unpaid work had diverse and at times fragmented trajectories, this account shifts between global, regional and national spheres, which often (but not always) interacted with one another.

Beijing ‘95 and other global conversations

Venezuelan conversations about the value of unpaid care work took place alongside, and in interaction with, similar transnational conversations among women’s movements, epistemic communities and policy-makers. Previously, with the exception of Gary Becker (1981) and other household economists and labour statisticians, the economic value of unpaid work – and that of unpaid care work specifically – remained largely invisible. When accounted for, it was often perceived as an obstacle for development (Wood, 2003).

The emergence of feminist economics in the 1970s began to illuminate women’s economic agency, the sexual division of labour and gender inequality across cultures (Kabeer, 1994) as part of a larger project of bringing women in the development process. The Accounting for Women’s Work Agenda was part of this push, emphasizing the contributions that women were already making to economies and societies (Benería, 1992; Benería and Sen, 1982). By measuring unpaid work in market terms, it ‘challenged the notion of “work” associated with the production for market exchanges’ (Esquivel, 2011: 218). Despite these epistemological advances, it took three World Conferences on Women (Copenhagen, 1980; Mexico, 1975; and Nairobi, 1985) before the issue was finally taken up by government agencies concerned with gender equality in the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.

The BPfA framed unpaid labour as a form of work that needed to be measured in market terms in ways similar to the Accounting for Women’s Work project. For example, section G. Strategic objective F1 required that governments

[s]eek to develop a more comprehensive knowledge of work and employment through, inter alia, efforts to measure and better understand the type, extent, and distribution of unremunerated work, particularly work in caring for dependants and unremunerated work done for family farms or businesses.(UN, 1995)¹

The BPfA prioritized the production and dissemination of knowledge in terms that were compatible with the SNA. It encouraged that the economic value of unpaid work be assessed ‘in quantitative terms, for possible reflection in accounts that may be produced separately from, but consistent with, core national accounts’ (UN, 1995).²

The BPfA’s emphasis on the UN international accounting system came scarcely 2 years after the publication of the SNA’s revised Manual of 1993. This new manual had opened the possibilities of national accounting through satellite accounts. Household Satellite Accounts portray the value of unpaid work done at the household in the same terms as the general economy is depicted (Inter-Secretariat Working Group on National Accounts, 1993). These changes opened an opportunity to measure non-monetized economic activities in macroeconomic terms.

Apart from the Accounting for Women’s Work, the International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWHC, currently the Global Women’s Strike) was another key advocate for measuring and valuing unpaid work. The IWHC sought remuneration of women’s unpaid work. The IWFC and other allies (Gortázar, 1995; Swiebel, 1999) were present at both the governmental and non-governmental conferences, where they established a strong relationship with Nora Castañeda, a Venezuelan activist and economics Professor, who had been promoting the recognition of unpaid care work at both Nairobi ‘85 and Beijing ‘95, and would later become a key advocate during the constitutional process of 1999 (Ciccariello-Maher, 2013).

Although the difference between the Accounting for Women’s Work Agenda and that of the IWFC is often framed as a North–South divide (Ciccariello-Maher, 2013), there were southern and northern feminists with reservations about the potential of wages for housework to institutionalize a conventional sexual division of labour (Interview with Adícea Castillo, 2016; Esquivel, 2011).³ The BPfA avoided any mention of compensation and framed its approach in ways similar to what the Accounting for Women’s Work proposed. However, global tensions between policy and normative approaches that emphasized recognition (reallocations of respect) or redistribution (reallocations of existing goods; Fraser, 1997: 27) continued beyond Beijing ‘95 (Esquivel, 2013; Swiebel, 1999).

In 1999, the Venezuelan Constitutional Assembly rehashed the tensions between recognition and redistribution approaches to unpaid care work. Through Article 88, the new Constitution became the first to recognize unpaid care work’s economic and social value. Most importantly, the article linked the recognition of the value of unpaid care work to women’s – particularly homemakers’ – right to social security. Given the temporal proximity between Beijing ‘95 and Venezuela’s Constitutional Assembly, it could be plausible to interpret Article 88 as the internalization of the BPfA’s mandate in terms similar to those of Finnemore and Sikkink’s three stages, while the redistributive emphasis of Article 88 – a characteristic that sets it apart from the BPfA – could be attributed to the interactions between the Venezuelan Civil Society Delegation to the Conference (led by Nora Castañeda) and the IWFC (see, for example, Fischer-Hoffman, 2008 and Ciccariello-Maher, 2013). Nevertheless, the transnational events of 1995 tell only part of the story of the trajectories of the value of unpaid care work in Venezuela.

A tragic accident, a feminist judge and a femocrat in the national and regional spheres

In Venezuela, policy discussions about the value of unpaid care work preceded the effect of World Conferences on Women. Nevertheless, these international conferences fostered the emergence of national and regional institutional frameworks that would facilitate the recognition of unpaid care work’s value nationally and regionally. In 1975, Judge Yolanda Poleo de Baez ruled that a bus company had to financially compensate the family of a woman who had been killed while riding a company’s bus. The victim had been a homemaker and mother of two young children. Poleo de Baez’s ruling explicitly established that the company’s compensation went to make up for the foregone economic value of the unpaid domestic work, health care and childrearing services that this woman would have provided for her family (Sarmiento Nuñez, 1994).

Poleo de Baez was part of the Venezuelan Federation of Women Lawyers (FEVA, for its name in Spanish), which was instrumental in getting women’s rights included in the Venezuelan legislation between 1936 and 1999 (Friedman, 2000, 2002). Poleo de Baez’s 1975 decision was scarcely known. It was ‘like an exotic bird – unknown to most labor lawyers and unionists’ (Interview with Héctor Valecillos 2016), and yet, it became an important reference among feminist activists in the 1980s (León, 2007; interview with Castillo, 2016). Furthermore, the value of unpaid work was taken up as a policy concern by a number of Venezuelan policy-makers in the Presidential Women’s Advisory Commission (COFEAPRE, for its name in Spanish). A sign of the impact of World Conferences on Women in national politics, COFEAPRE was created in 1974 in preparation for Mexico ‘75 and was upgraded to the rank of Ministry for Women’s Participation in Development in 1979.⁴

Mercedes Pulido de Briceño became the first person to hold the post. A social psychologist and a member of the Christian Democratic Party (COPEI), Pulido de Briceño was seasoned in development planning and also had previous experience in working for regional development institutions. Despite being convinced of the need to bring democracy to the household level, she was unknown to the emerging women’s movement. Being unknown to women’s movements helped persuade the political elite that her work as minister would not be easily taken as ‘radical feminist’ activism (Friedman, 2000: 180).

Pulido de Briceño played a critical role in advancing key parts of the women’s movement’s agenda. When she became the minister, Venezuela took a leadership role in promoting the measurement of women’s unpaid contributions in regional fora conveyed by the ILO and ECLAC. One such forum was the Eleventh Conference of Member States of the Americas of the ILO, held in Medellin in 1979. Following Mexico 1975’s mandate, and as part of the UN Decade for Women, the Conference produced a series of recommendations for ILO’s Action Plan for Women in the region, as well as a set of proposals for ECLAC’s Second Regional Conference on the Inclusion of Women in Social and Economic Development.

In Medellin, delegations from Venezuela and Brazil were instrumental in pushing for resolutions that promoted the measurement of women’s unpaid work, as well as the recognition of its value and implications as an obstacle for women’s pursuit of their own ‘economic potential’ (ILO, 1979: 16). Brazil and Venezuela made specific requests to the ILO to address issues of measurement and value of women’s work. The Venezuelan delegation, together with Uruguay, went on to head the special commission designated to prepare the first draft of the Medellin Resolutions (ILO, 1979: 13).

The Medellin Resolutions were framed in ways that correspond to the ‘women in development’ emphasis on women’s economic agency and contributions to development and agriculture that were prevalent in the 1970s (see, for example, Boserup, 1970). These views resonated in Latin America due to women’s absence from agricultural statistics, low labour participation and over-representation in domestic work (ILO, 1979, 1984). There were doubts about the extent to which labour statistics were effectively accounting for women’s work. Furthermore, ECLAC and the ILO’s Latin American Office began to show concern with the way unpaid care work deterred women from effectively participating in the labour market. Both organizations incorporated the notion of women’s doble jornada or double labour shift as an impediment for their full participation in economic development (ECLAC, 1981; Barrera, 1978).

Mexico ‘75 prompted important discussions about unpaid care work in Latin America and the Caribbean, which were fostered by the ILO and ECLAC. These regional discussions highlighted the limitations of conventional economic indicators to effectively account for unpaid care work and women’s contributions to development. Thus, the Medellin Resolutions called for the revision of measurement categories: ‘[. . .] in order to more accurately record the participation of disadvantaged sectors, with particular reference to women, and statistically evaluate the activity of women at the household level [. . .]’ (ILO, 1979: 20). Sixteen years before 1995, Latin American governments called for measurements that would make women’s contribution to development visible. They went a step further, calling governments to ‘establish ways to protect those [unpaid]activities in the same way that other labor activities that are effectively valued and protected’ (ILO, 1979: 21, my emphasis).

The Medellin Resolutions created a precedent in favour of access to social security independently of labour market participation. This progressive perspective was compliant with the 1966 International Conference of Labour Statisticians that defined labour force as comprised of ‘all persons of either sex who furnish the supply of economic goods and services’ (Benería, 1992: 1548, citing ILO, 1976, International Recommendations on Labour Statistics, Geneva). The work of the international epistemic community of labour statisticians and the regional ILO office found considerable traction in Latin America’s regional forums. Their view was reflected by the Medellin discussions.

A time-use survey in Caracas, 1983

Venezuela was an active participant in regional discussions that later permeated its own national agenda. Following the Medellin Resolutions, Venezuela’s Ministry for the Participation of Women in Development convened the First National Consultation on Female Labour Force’s Work and Productivity in 1982. The consultation brought together Venezuela’s epistemic community of economists and women leaders who were economists and also feminist activists. The consultation involved researchers close to Minister Pulido de Briceño such as Héctor Valecillos – university professor and trade union advisor – as well as academics and activists from the Women’s movement like Adícea Castillo and Nora Castañeda (Interviews with Adícea Castillo and Héctor Valecillos, 2016).

Venezuela’s first time-use survey (TUS) was a project developed by Valecillos, drawing on international experiences. The survey was carried out in 1983 in the Metropolitan Area of Caracas with the purpose of addressing ‘unions’ concerns about women’s paid work and how it was affected by the way unpaid work was organized’ (Interview with Héctor Valecillos 2016).

Valecillos’ approach reflected the ILO’s understanding of unpaid work’s prevalence as a sign of underdevelopment and poverty. Understanding unpaid care work was perceived as ‘a prerequisite in the search for growth and wellbeing and – through them – for the emancipation of women’ (ILO, 1984: 19).

Venezuela’s 1983 TUS proved that, measured in GDP terms, unpaid work was the second economic sector in the country (BCV and Ministerio de Estado para la participación de la Mujer en el Desarrollo [MPMD], 1983). Furthermore, its final report argued that in contexts of poverty, households were bearing the brunt of fiscal austerity: ‘In a situation of real crisis [. . .] that translates into the deterioration of social services, the ‘destiny of the Nation’ tends to depend [. . .] on families’ ability to confront, with their own resources, the shortfalls associated with the crisis’ (Urdaneta De Ferrán, 1994: 114, citing BCV and MPMD, 1983 my emphasis). Emphasis on the transfer of costs from government to households presaged what would become one of the main concerns for women movements from the global south in Beijing ‘95: women were bearing the cost of structural adjustment.

Minister Pulido de Briceño had envisioned the measurement of unpaid care work’s value as a first step towards the development of public policies to bring women into the labour market and then provide public social services (Pulido De Briceño, 1981 and personal communication, 2011). While the TUS was moving forward, Pulido de Briceño developed a strategic alliance with feminist circles and became a central advocate for the reform of the Civil Code (Friedman, 2002; Rakowski, 2003). Judge Poleo de Baez was her close adviser in this process. Poleo de Baez brought her legacy concerning the value of unpaid work by way of recognizing wives’ right to own marital property.

The TUS results were not used to inform social policy to the extent that Pulido de Briceño had hoped (Pulido de Briceño, personal communication; Interview with Valecillos, 2016). For Valecillos, the Ministry ‘did not have enough strength’ to get its own agenda into national policy discussions (Interview, 2016). Moreover, in 1984 a newly elected government reduced the Ministry of Women’s Participation in Development to a special office of the Ministry for Youth (Friedman, 2000).

Despite being little known beyond the women’s movement and the epistemic community of economists and national accountants, the ruling of 1975 and the TUS of 1983 broadened the scope of activism for women’s labour rights in Venezuela. According to Castillo – Venezuelan feminist activist and economics professor⁵ – the ruling and the study expanded the feminist agenda that had focused traditionally on childcare provision and now began to think about the work done by women beyond the market (Interview with Adícea Castillo 2016).

The idea of valuing unpaid care work travels from Caracas to Nairobi and back

Venezuela’s women’s movement’s preparations for the Third World Conference on Women in Nairobi ‘85 were informed by the ruling of 1975, the successful experience of Civil Code Reform and the results of the TUS of 1983. The Venezuelan civil society agenda for the global process was informed by significant experiences at the national level. Preparations for Nairobi helped to spur the creation of the Coordinating Committee of Women’s Organizations (CONG in Spanish), which prepared a document representing the civil society agenda for the international conference (Castañeda, 2000; Espina and Rakowski, 2002). CONG’s document for Nairobi incorporated their concern with the value of women’s unpaid care work based on Poleo de Baez’s sentence and the 1983 survey (Ciccariello-Maher, 2013; Interview with Adícea Castillo 2016).

Preparing for global advocacy in Nairobi, CONG had also begun to prepare for its advocacy for the reform of the Labour Law at the national level. Judge Poleo de Baez became the lead author of the CONG’s draft proposal for the new Law, which included the provision of social security for homemakers, a 6-hour work day for nursing mothers, the extension of equal labour rights to domestic workers and home-based workers, and the creation and expansion of daycare centres at the workplace for the children of women and men workers (Interview Elfenbein, 2015; Friedman, 2002; Interview with Adícea Castillo 2016).

The reform of the Labour Law was a lengthy process. It occurred during a presidential election and a broad political crisis. Venezuela had been severely hit by the debt crisis during the 1980s, and the political, social and economic consequences were clearly visible in the late 1980s and 1990s (Friedman, 2000; Richter, 2007). The idea of expanding government expenditures was politically unfeasible during the heyday of austerity politics. Women’s movements dropped their demand for social security for homemakers ‘when they realized that in the context of an ascendant neoliberalism, the [. . .] state and authorities would not accept it’ (Elfenbein, 2015: 55).

In 1993, Valecillos and the then President of the National Council for Women (CONAMU in Spanish), Evangelina García Prince, proposed that the Central Bank carry out a second TUS (Interview with Valecillos, 2016). Their petition was ignored, and the bank would not carry out such research until 2008. The orthodox perspectives of the bank authorities and the financial constraints that the country was experiencing limited the chances of the proposal. Fiscal austerity defeated two major actions to value unpaid care work, pushed for by two different sets of actors in the early 1990s: the women movements’ proposal to include homemakers in social security, and femocrats’ and epistemic community’s effort to conduct a new TUS.

Lukewarm interest at the national level but global attention

Efforts to make unpaid care work visible at the national level had seemingly come to a halt. Yet, different nationally based epistemic communities, femocrats and women movements continued to push their agendas of valuing unpaid care work with support from regional and international organizations, and sometimes in dialogue with global social movements. Their efforts were often disjointed from one another and played out at national and global arenas.

The third version of the SNA manual published in 1993 formally incorporated satellite accounts that had the potential of reflecting the macroeconomic value of unpaid work. After the recent failed attempts to move forward with a new TUS or to include homemakers in the social security system, new efforts were bounded to the design of a satellite household account that would be filled with TUS data (as well as data from other surveys) and would facilitate the estimation of the macroeconomic value of unpaid work done in Venezuelan households.

The prototype project created a technical demand for TUS data. It was commissioned by the Ministry of Family with international funding from the Andean Corporation for Development. The prototype’s design incorporated the new version of the SNA 1993, showing the way in which part of the national accounting system could be adapted to the new global norm.

The prototype was designed by Lourdes Urdaneta de Ferrán, one of the researchers that processed the 1983 TUS data. She had extensive technical experience working on SNA for national institutions such as the Central Bank, as well as for the UN International Research and Training for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) and UN Development Program (UNDP) (Interview with Urdaneta de Ferrán, 2016).

Regional funding and a national expert with international experience kept the agenda for accounting for women’s work moving in Venezuela. Despite the lukewarm interest at the national level, the UNDP hired Urdaneta de Ferrán to participate in the research teams preparing the Venezuelan and international HDRs. Venezuela was one of the three Latin American countries that contributed with data for the report and one of the only two countries from the Global South that were studied in detail⁶ (UNDP, 1995). The signature report showcased a detailed analysis of the 1983 TUS data which established that despite being a minority in the paid labour force, Venezuelan women did 56% of the work (UNDP, 1995: 95).⁷ Although it had received scarce attention nationally, the Venezuelan TUS of 1983 had become a global reference.

From global to national: how the idea of unpaid work’s value travelled from Beijing back to Venezuela

Paradoxically, despite its focus on women’s poverty, Venezuela’s government delegation to Beijing ‘95 did not make any reference to its own publicly funded TUS, household account prototype or to the HDR that highlighted them (Bello de Guzman, 1995; Interviews with Moni Pizani and Adícea Castillo 2016). National efforts to make unpaid care work visible had been isolated and far from mainstreamed. Nevertheless, civil society groups’ mobilization participation in Beijing ‘95 placed the issue back into their global and national advocacy agendas.

Venezuela’s women’s rights groups’ contributions to Beijing ‘95 incorporated unpaid care work as a normative concern. However, it did not include the results of the 1983 survey in its arguments and proposals. Furthermore, the Venezuelan civil society delegation had no knowledge of the existence of Urdaneta de Ferran’s prototype (Interview with Castillo, 2016). According to Castillo, who was a civil society delegate to Nairobi and Beijing, economic issues and approaches were the least addressed by the movement (Interviews Elfenbein, 2015; with Adícea Castillo and Moni Pizani 2016).

Nora Castañeda was the president of the Venezuelan civil society delegation. A founding member of the CONG, Castañeda (2000) had a long political trajectory within leftist parties and had participated in the 1982 consultation in which the 1983 TUS project was first discussed publicly. She joined the economic caucus in the NGO Conference held in tandem with Beijing ‘95, where she established a close relationship with the IWHC. Through this relationship, Castañeda established the link between the CONG’s proposal to assign social security rights to homemakers and the IWHC’s wages for housework agenda (Fischer-Hoffman, 2008; Motta, 2013).

Four years after Beijing, Hugo Chávez – an outsider of the political system – was elected President with the promise of re-writing the national constitution through a national constituent process in 1999. Once elected, he fulfilled his promise and called for a Constituent Assembly that lasted 4 months and resulted in a new Constitution. Women’s rights activists approached the constitutional process with the recent transnational experience of Beijing, as well as decades of political mobilization. Preparations for Beijing ‘95 had paved the way for the construction of a political agenda for women (Elfenbein, 2015) and their participation in the Beijing process reinvigorated old concerns with valuing unpaid care work.⁸

The Constituent Assembly was a key opportunity for the idea of valuing unpaid care work to become part of the national policy stream. Part of the civil society delegation that participated in Beijing ‘95 included some of the main lobbyists who pushed Article 88 forward. Nora Castañeda, Moni Pizani and Adícea Castillo had been key representatives in Beijing and were fully involved in the constituent process. Their national lobby efforts were influenced by their recent global advocacy experiences, as well as by more than a decade discussing the value of unpaid care work in national and global spaces. One of their victories was that the new Constitution gave constitutional character to all human rights conventions subscribed by Venezuela⁹ (Jiménez, 2000). Lobbyists used international conventions such as Beijing ‘95 as central tools to raise awareness among Constituent Assembly members (Interview with Moni Pizani 2016). International campaigns led by IOs such as ILO’s (1994) ‘Every Woman is a Working Woman’ were also useful to frame the idea that unpaid care labour is a form of work (Interviews with Morelba Jiménez and Adícea Castillo, 2016). Similarly, the BPfA was instrumental in establishing that unpaid care work was productive in economic terms (Interviews with Adícea Castillo 2016 and Fischer-Hoffman, 2008; Morelba Jiménez 2016). Another way in which the global sphere impacted the national constituent process was through IOs funding to facilitate women’s participation and advocacy (Jiménez, 2000; Rakowski and Espina, 2010; Interview with Pizani 2016).

Despite countrywide efforts to foster the emergence of women candidates to the Constituent Assembly (Interview Portocarrero, 2000; with Jiménez 2016), nominating women and feminist candidates to the constituent process was ‘a universal disaster’ (Castañeda, 2000: 52). Women did not have enough influence over political parties and no experience in nomination processes. Only 12% of elected Constituent Assembly delegates were women. Castañeda and María León among other feminist leaders close to the new government promoted a class-based feminist perspective (Castañeda, 2000; León, 2000). They were, however, part of a wider coalition of feminists lobbying during the constituent process. Decades of coalition-building experience proved strategic for women’s movements during this process. For example, CONG was explicitly supporting two assembly members, one of which was Blancanieve Portocarrero, a key advocate for Article 88. While trying to channel a feminist agenda through its two delegates, CONG members and other allies engaged in intensive lobbying and advocacy. They developed a sense of ownership over the process and ‘had a better handle on the issue [of unpaid care work]’ (Interview with Adícea Castillo 2016).

When ideas of unpaid care work’s value reached the policy stream

Although the formal discussion about Article 88’s content was relatively uneventful (Elfenbein, 2015), significant debates took place before the article reached that stage (Interview Pizani, 2000; Portocarrero, 2000; with Morelba Jiménez 2016). Blancanieve Portocarrero (2000) had to bring Article 88 back into plenary discussions time and again. A FEVA member, Portocarrero played a key part in the Commission that edited all proposals and defined what items made it to the plenary discussions. Despite being deleted from the plenary agenda three times, Portocarrero’s argumentative effort and persistence allowed that Article 88 finally made it into plenary discussions. For Portocarrero (2000), the philosophical underpinning of Article 88 was that ‘human capital depends on the capacity of women, their sensibility, their service vocation’ (p. 159). Article 88 reached the plenary through Portocarrero’s emotional appeals (Interview Portocarrero, 2000; with Morelba Jiménez 2016). Once it reached the plenary, the Article was approved while discussions about its implementation were postponed after the constituent process was finalized.

The maternalist arguments that landed the idea of valuing unpaid care work in the new Constitution used an affective rhetoric that made the feminist agenda more palatable for most Assembly members. There were few economic arguments in the way the issue was framed, and I found no reference to the results of the 1983 survey, the HDR or the prototype for a satellite household account available since 1994 (Interviews with Adícea Castillo, Moni Pizani, Morelba Jiménez, Lourdes Urdaneta de Ferran 2016). There was resistance to economic-based arguments among some activists in the women’s movement. Attaching a monetary value to unpaid work was interpreted as ‘a capitalist conception of work’, which was at odds with a vision that highlighted affectivity such as Portocarrero’s (Interview with Morelba Jiménez 2016). The resulting article established that

The State guarantees equality and equity between men and women in the exercise of the right to work. The State recognizes housework as an economic activity that creates added value and produces social welfare and wealth. Housewives are entitled to social security in accordance with the law.

Despite the maternalist rhetoric, Article 88 had significant economic implications. It had an explicit emphasis on labour rights and, most importantly, brought up questions regarding the fiscal implications of granting the right to social security to homemakers.

Article 88 internalized Beijing’s idea that unpaid care work is an economic activity that produces macroeconomic value and yet went further by assigning homemakers the right to social security. In that way, Article 88 resonates more closely with the ideas promoted by the Medellin Declaration of 1979, in which a Venezuelan government delegation was a key player.

Conclusion: the role of transnational and regional spheres in normative change processes at the national level

In response to questions about the origins of Article 88, a key femocrat of the early 1990s remarked, ‘Article 88 had nothing to do with Beijing!’ (personal communication, Informant A). For her and other Venezuelan feminists, the article’s origins derive solely from the historical struggles of the Venezuelan women’s movement. Other sources, however, point out the significance of international conventions and transnational interactions as a way of framing the women’s agenda in policy terms (Jiménez, 2000; Pizani, 2000; Portocarrero, 2000; Interviews with Moni Pizani and Adícea Castillo 2016).

The regional sphere is rarely evoked in accounts of the ideational trajectories that ultimately led to Article 88. Nevertheless, Article 88’s content resonates very closely with the Medellin Resolutions of 1979. The ECLAC and ILO regional meetings of the late 1970s and early 1980s had emphasized the need to measure and value women’s unpaid work arguing for the inclusion of homemakers in the social security system. It was in compliance with these regional commitments that Venezuela led its first TUS in 1983, a time when such research was rare. These regional venues were one of the few spaces in which the survey results were disseminated (Interview ILO, 1984; Interview with Hector Valecillos, 2016).

Venezuelan women’s movement, femocrats and the epistemic community of economists and national accountants actively participated in national, regional and transnational conversations about the value of unpaid care work since 1975. For movement leaders, unpaid care work was an issue of social justice and inequality. For the epistemic community, this was a matter of measurement, labour markets and development. Their conversations ran parallel trajectories that scarcely intersected but contributed to interconnected processes at national, regional and transnational levels. The few intersections were either facilitated by femocrats or by the events that took place in Beijing ‘95. With different degrees of success, Mercedes Pulido de Briceño and Evangelina García Prince tried to open space for TUS research that they expected would facilitate the transition of ideas of the value of unpaid care work into the policy stream. Pulido de Briceño organized a symposium in which feminist leaders became aware of the possibilities of time-use research in 1982; and Garcia Prince lobbied the Central Bank to carry out another survey. However, Beijing ‘95 was the transnational event in which the Venezuelan feminists became acquainted with the possibility of using satellite accounts as measurement, despite the fact that Venezuela had developed its own account prototype (Interview with Adícea Castillo, 2016).

The epistemic community’s efforts to quantify the value of unpaid care work in macroeconomic terms fed into the transnational conversations that informed the Beijing process. This was facilitated by expert collaboration such as the case of Urdaneta de Ferran’s participation in the World Development Report of 1995 and Valecillos’ participation in events sponsored by ILO in 1984. The Venezuelan TUS notably received more attention from regional and global institutions than from national ones. Surprisingly, there was a clear disconnection between the Venezuelan women’s movement and the work of the epistemic community.

Despite this fragmentation, women activists, femocrats, and members of the epistemic community actively participated in domestic, regional and transnational norm-making processes. Although these actors were not participating together in these events, they were advocating for valuing unpaid care work for at least two decades before the BPfA was signed and Article 88 was drafted. In this context, understanding Article 88 as the internalization of BPfA would only explain part of the outcome. As the historical analysis presented by this research demonstrates, Article 88 is the result of a longer set of conversations that occurred nationally, regionally and transnationally, among which the Beijing ‘95 was important and yet not the sole tipping point. In fact, Beijing ‘95 rehashed conversations that Latin American policy-makers had held years before.

Women movement leaders, femocrats and epistemic community members had a sense of normative agency over processes and events that led to the drafting of the BPfA and Article 88. Members of the epistemic community contributed to the macroeconomic approach favoured by the BPfA. Yet, femocrats and women movement activists were the principal norm entrepreneurs of the national norm (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998).

In Venezuela, the idea of valuing unpaid work emerged thanks to a judicial decision of 1975. It then moved to the regional sphere where the idea changed from being a legal precedent at the national level to a regional discussion about development and labour rights. The idea would then move back and forth between national, regional and global spheres in messy and fragmented ways. The constitutional process of 1999 opened a window of opportunity to finally translate the idea into a norm. In these trajectories, norm-takers often acted as norm-makers in a fragmented iterative process.

Understanding Article 88 from a transnational perspective that underscores context, as well as the diversity of actors involved, provides a complex historical perspective about the norm and its national, regional and transnational origins. The normative agency of diverse groups and individuals was central for the idea to emerge as early as 1975. Also, spaces for dialogue between governments, movements and epistemic communities at national, regional and global levels were necessary for the idea to get traction. Ultimately, a constituent window was seized by key actors who framed a potentially subversive idea in ways that were palatable to decision-makers at the domestic level. The global and the regional legacy of the idea of unpaid care work’s value provided legitimacy for this idea to take hold in the new Constitution. Key actors such as femocrats, an epistemic community and women movements acted as norm-makers (as in the case of Judge Poleo de Baez in 1975, or during the Constituent Assembly of 1999) and norm-takers (as in the development of Venezuela’s first TUS in 1983) interchangeably. One set of actors would often move from norm-maker to norm-taker and viceversa depending on the context.

Analyses grounded on methodological nationalism provide only partial explanations for domestic policy change. Likewise, interpretations that emphasize the influence of the transnational sphere need to consider normative agency of domestic actors, and the significance of context within the national sphere, to properly account for the transnational aspects of normative and policy changes in the national sphere. After all, an idea deemed as extravagant as an exotic bird in the Venezuela of 1975 evolved into a constitutional norm in 1999, thanks to transnational, regional and national trajectories led by a diverse group of national actors.

Interviews conducted for this research

Héctor Valecillos, Phone interview conducted on 28 June 2016

Adícea Castillo, Phone interview conducted on 5 July 2016

Moni Pizani, Skype interview conducted on 11 July 2016

Morelba Jiménez, Phone interview conducted on 9 July 2016

Lourdes Urdaneta de Ferrán, Phone interview conducted on 17 October 2016

Personal email communications

Informant A, 27 June 2016

Mercedes Pulido de Briceño, 14 September 2011; 5 July 2016

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all comments provided to earlier versions of this work by ISA RC19 2016 Conference participants, two rigorous GSP anonymous reviewers, and colleagues Charis Enns, Brock Bersaglio, and Antulio Rosales. This research was possible thanks to Venezuelan activists and social scientists’ disposition to share their time and knowledge with me during in-depth phone interviews, and to them, I offer all my appreciation and respect. All mistakes remain my own. I especially offer my gratitude to Prof. Adícea Castillo, Prof. Nora Castañeda, and Mercedes Pulido de Briceño and to a generation of coalition-building feminists who contributed greatly to the Constitution of 1999. As this article goes to print, a new Constituent Assembly is taking place in Venezuela with significantly less diversity, coalition building, and democratic participation than in 1999.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Masaya Llavaneras Blanco is a PhD Candidate in Global Governance at Wilfrid Laurier University - Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, Canada. Her research focuses on the political economy of care, the intersections between wellbeing and political subjectivities, and mobility.

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