Time, Energy, and Structural Inequality across Global Food Provisioning Systems

The 3rd Global Inequality Conference at the Paris School of Economics on June 4-6 brought together participants from 58 countries, with a central focus on the launch of the Global Justice Report (GJR) by the World Inequality Lab. The GJR outlines a set of normative scenarios for achieving global justice, built on three pillars: decarbonisation, sufficiency, and reducing inequality.

A series of plenary sessions, involving renowned scholars, activists and public figures, covered a wide range of topics, including global wealth taxation, political mobilisation, degrowth, the Bretton Woods system, gender, and the energy and climate transition, which are key to achieving the goals set out in the GJR.
The conference theme aligns well with the REMASS view: starting with normative goals, identifying malleable ways to engage motivated state and non-state actors, and designing new global governance amid disruption to the global order. However, the GJR scenarios fall short in representing the wellbeing aspects beyond income, wealth and labour hour metrics, and in depicting the complex web of provisioning systems.

In a parallel session on “Working Hours,” Jihoon Min presented research on time–wellbeing inequalities in the global food provisioning system. While other presentations followed traditional economic approaches and focused primarily on working-hours inequalities, his contribution connected economic and domestic time to service delivery and, in turn, to wellbeing—an approach that proved both novel and well received.
Beyond the session, he engaged with scholars working on capabilities approaches, including Tania Burchardt (LSE) and Ingrid Robeyns (Utrecht University), and shared relevant materials with them.