Towards a Feminist Geo-legal Ethic of Caring Within Medical Supply Chains: Lessons from Careless Supply During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

AbstractThe COVID-19 crisis illustrates the fragility of supply chains. Countries with excellent health systems struggled to ensure essential supplies of food, medicines, and personal protective equipment which were vital to a fast and effective response. Using geo-legality, which maps the constitutive relations between law and space, we argue that the failure of supply chains in many western countries during the crisis reveals a fundamental tension between their role as facilitators of care and caring, and the logistic logics by which they operate. While supply chains link the intimate, domestic concerns of providing medical care with the globalised geographical concerns of moving goods across different jurisdictions at the right time, their contemporary organisation and regulation does not reflect the caring relations and public goods they are meant to support. Drawing on analysis of examples from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this article argues that a reconfiguration of supply chains in accordance with feminist approaches that place care at the centre of supply chain operation and organisation will be important to amendments of both domestic and global health law.