Dividing Responsibility for Care: Tracing the Ethics of Care in Local Care Strategies

Abstract

This article analyses local care policies through the lens of the feminist ethics of care. The focus is on the normative understandings regarding care that emerge in local care strategy documents and how these understandings relate with the concept of ‘responsibility’. In this article, strategies published by the municipality of Jyväskylä, Finland, between the years 2008 and 2016, are analysed using Trace analysis. The research questions are: How is the division of responsibility regarding care among different actors constructed in the strategies? How do the roles assigned to these different actors accord with the principles of ethics of care? The findings show that the documents emphasise individual responsibility in managing risks related to old age, as the norms of local societal institutions are largely detached from the principles of ethics of care. The analysis also reveals the absence of gender and human frailty from the care strategy documents. Rethinking the strategies through the lens of the ethic of care would mean reconceptualising responsibility as relational.