Buenos Aires Commitment: A Care Society

When care belongs only to the private language of love and family responsibility, questions about who performs it, who may refuse and how carers live can disappear from public debate. The Buenos Aires Commitment makes those arrangements political. This Spanish-language text of November 11, 2022, from the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, proposes a care society in which both carers and people receiving care have rights. Work treated as private inclination becomes an institutional responsibility.

Clause 8 recognizes rights to provide care, receive care and exercise self-care, with responsibility shared among the state, businesses, families, communities and individuals. This does not mean everyone must care in identical ways, or restore praise for women’s unconditional sacrifice. Clause 9 connects time, resources, benefits and universal public services. Recognition must change access to time, income and alternatives, rather than simply acknowledge exhaustion.

Two sets of rights, neither disposable

Clause 10 calls for expanded care leave, including non-waivable, non-transferable paternity leave. Its political force lies in challenging an institutional default in which women provide care and men optionally help. Clause 13 turns to paid domestic workers’ rights. One family’s convenience cannot justify another group of women losing labor protection. If public support merely helps affluent women hire poorly paid carers, the cost of the division of labor may have changed hands without being redistributed fairly.

Clause 14 also affirms disabled people’s autonomy, independence and freedom to make decisions. Providing care cannot confer authority to determine the recipient’s life. Clause 22 includes organizations of carers and people dependent on care, domestic workers’ unions and feminist groups in policy design, implementation and follow-up. Neither decent working conditions nor service users’ control should be canceled by invoking the other’s needs. Where interests conflict, institutions must enable negotiation and accountability rather than assume agreement.

Migration exposes the scale of responsibility. Clauses 23–24 address structures producing vulnerability and the rights of women in global and regional care chains. Helping a household at the destination does not resolve care as a whole: workers’ own families, cross-border rights and participation in decisions can remain outside the arrangement. A public right to care cannot leave its costs with people across the border.

Budgets make commitments concrete

Clauses 26–31 connect care with revenue, spending, investment, progressive taxation, debt and fiscal restraint. Cutting public services rarely abolishes the need for care; it can return unpaid work to households, distributed through existing gender and class relations. The text calls for avoiding cuts that deepen women’s poverty and unpaid workload. Care policy therefore concerns the effects of economic policy as a whole, beyond a dedicated budget line.

Clauses 34–35 call for time-use measurement, recognition of unpaid work and measures of well-being beyond GDP. A tension remains worth holding open: if care matters only because it expands employment or economic growth, are people unable to enter paid work again made secondary? The right to receive care provides grounds for resisting that instrumental logic. Clause 45 provides for voluntary progress reporting. The political commitment itself cannot demonstrate available services or replace scrutiny of budgets, coverage and lived experience.

The Montevideo Strategy connects the commitment to institutions, funding, information and accountability. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas’s Servants of Globalization asks whose family separation and care burdens make time available to other households. Together these paths make a care society a test of redistributed responsibility, rather than only a reassuring aspiration.