In this episode, Siya Goyal and Juliana Lariios are joined by Maria Jose Rivadulla based at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá whose work sits at the intersection of urban studies, sociology and gender studies. She has published extensively on urban inequality, segregation, and most recently the city’s feminist care policy, the CIVICUS Care Blocks in Bogotá (Manzanas del Cuidado), which this episodes is focused on.
Widely regarded as the world’s first care-oriented local policy, the Care Blocks emerged from decades of feminist organising in Colombia and a broader push to institutionalise care within the city’s District Care System (SIDICU). We trace the socio-historical context and civil network of street and state bureaucrats that made an explicitly feminist municipal policy possible under Mayor Claudia López in 2020, and examine how the initiative works to simultaneously recognise, reduce, and redistribute unpaid care work in localised contexts.
But, can a city policy do what national welfare states have failed to? And how does national policy interact, or work against, local policy? We explore how far a policy can be radical and locally adapted, whilst also work within existing structures of governance and tight budgets. Maria’s work spans sociological work within local government, where her team’s research, particularly her 2024 article “Making the State Care”, examining the role of political brokerage, has contributed to the expansion and adjustment of the CIVICUS project itself.
Looking to the future, we then discuss how cities and governments can draw from this model and the recipe for change that could be replicated in other developing contexts.
Sources:
Álvarez-Rivadulla, María José, Friederike Fleischer, and Adriana Hurtado-Tarazona. 2024. “Making the State Care: The Role of Political Willingness and Brokerage in Bogotá’s New Feminist Care Policy.” City 28 (5): 637–658. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2024.241246.
Álvarez-Rivadulla, María José, Sebastián Orlando Espejo Fandiño, Friederike Fleischer, María José Gómez, Adriana Hurtado-Tarazona, Anyela Lizeth Moreno Palma, Vanesa Estefanía Ospina Ramírez, and Daniel Sanchez Vega. 2026. “Care Networks as Unanticipated Gains of Local Public Policy.” Nature Cities. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00389-6. Alvarez et al 2026_Care Networks.pdf
Razavi, Shahra. 2007. The Political and Social Economy of Care in a Development Context: Conceptual Issues, Research Questions and Policy Options. Gender and Development Programme Paper No. 3. Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD).
Edited by Rowan Berkley
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