The study centers on the ACWF’s Featured Projects List, an annual recognition program that highlights exemplary initiatives by women’s social organizations serving women, children, and families. Unlike government purchase-of-service contracting, which involves formal agreements and competitive bidding, these lists function primarily as honorific mechanisms. They identify model projects, publicize preferred organizational models, and confer institutional legitimacy on selected organizations. By choosing which projects to celebrate, the ACWF effectively defines what counts as valuable women’s work and determines which forms of civic participation receive political endorsement. The researchers argue that this recognition-based mechanism operates through what scholars call control and empowerment, shaping nonprofit development through legitimacy-sharing rather than direct funding or regulation.

The analysis identifies three interrelated mechanisms through which this co-production unfolds. The first is institutional incorporation, through which the Party-state selectively integrates social organizations into Party-led governance. The researchers found a clear trajectory across the three years of project lists: in 2023, the focus centered on moral education and patriotic socialization for children; by 2024, the framework expanded to encompass women, children, and families; and in 2025, a new emphasis emerged on establishing Women’s Federation branches within social organizations themselves. This shift reflects a broader policy push, articulated by President Xi Jinping in October 2023, to achieve full coverage of Women’s Federation organizations across new economic and social organizations.

The institutional logic of this incorporation becomes strikingly concrete in the study’s archival findings. In Guangdong Province, establishing a Women’s Federation branch was explicitly included as a scoring item worth two points in the official evaluation criteria for charity organizations, alongside other Party-building indicators. During fieldwork in northern China, an interviewee from a county-level children’s welfare organization confirmed that creating such a branch had become a practical requirement for achieving higher scores in annual nonprofit assessments. Political alignment, in other words, has been transformed into a measurable dimension of organizational performance, embedding Party-state priorities directly into the administrative metrics of the nonprofit sector.

The second mechanism, discursive role alignment, concerns how women are portrayed in officially recognized projects. Here the researchers uncovered a striking pattern: among the 180 projects analyzed, nearly half contained unclear gender representations, referring broadly to the work of organizations or volunteers without specifying who performed the activities. When women were explicitly visible, they were almost always depicted as providers of care and moral guidance, comforting children, mediating family relations, and fostering social harmony. Even in projects focused on women’s political mobilization, which nearly doubled by 2025, women’s participation was framed less as empowerment and more as service, translating domestic virtues into public moral work under titles such as matchmaker and family mediator.

Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this gendered framing is the widespread use of maternal identities in volunteer programs. At least 16 of the 180 projects adopted labels such as Loving Mother or Neighbor Mother, assigning volunteers a symbolic maternal role upon participation. According to the Yunnan Women’s Federation, the term is broadly defined and technically open to men, yet all volunteers were still referred to as mothers regardless of gender. The researchers interpret this as a feminized governance template in which motherhood functions simultaneously as metaphor and managerial device, standardizing how care should be practiced in public life and tying women’s civic participation to the state’s moral order.

The third mechanism, gendered co-production for affective governance, emerges most clearly from the fieldwork. In a county in northern China, the researchers observed a close partnership between a children’s welfare organization featured on the 2023 list and the local Women’s Federation. A Federation official explained that the organization could take children on a three-day summer hike without the层层 approvals that would stall a government-led initiative, admiring their passion and dedication while acknowledging that her own office would never dare organize such an activity. The organization, in turn, valued the Federation’s name as a protective shield, with one staff member noting that having the Women’s Federation alongside them made everything feel much safer. This mutual exchange of flexibility for legitimacy illustrates how co-production operates as a pragmatic strategy for navigating resource scarcity and bureaucratic risk.

The researchers also documented how this partnership extends into legally ambiguous territory. During fieldwork, they observed a case in which a child urgently needed shelter but did not meet the legal criteria for direct state intervention. Through informal coordination among the local Women’s Federation, a juvenile protection center, and other agencies, the social organization helped devise a flexible rescue plan that all parties tacitly endorsed. Operating in this grey zone, the organization acted as liaison and mediator, bridging institutional gaps while preserving bureaucratic legitimacy. Such cases reveal that co-production in China is sustained not only through administrative coordination but through emotional credibility, trust, and moral reputation, qualities the researchers describe as the affective infrastructure of governance.

The study situates these findings within broader fiscal and political constraints. Local Women’s Federations often lack the budgets and staffing to serve women, children, and families adequately, making collaboration with social organizations a necessity rather than a choice. Policy documents institutionalize this affective logic, with the 14th Five-Year Plan for Women’s Federation Work promoting initiatives such as the Mother’s Health Action so that women and children fully feel the warmth of the Party. In this model, private care is recast as a public obligation, and women’s emotional labor is transformed into an administrative resource. The researchers note that this arrangement resembles soft budgeting, in which state actors transfer service responsibilities to social organizations without formal fiscal commitments, offering symbolic recognition in return.

The study’s conclusions carry a central paradox. Women’s care and emotional labor are publicly celebrated as moral virtues while simultaneously instrumentalized as technologies of political control. Women’s social organizations emerge neither as autonomous civic actors nor as passive state instruments, but as hybrid entities embedded in a governance system where bureaucratic, moral, and affective forces converge. Yet the researchers also identify ambivalence within these arrangements: within the moral idiom of service, women and their organizations sometimes reinterpret official expectations through acts of solidarity, creativity, and affective commitment that subtly reshape governance from below. The authors call for future policy reforms that would recognize emotional labor as skilled, professional, and politically consequential work, and that would decouple care from gendered prescriptions, supporting more equitable and sustainable forms of governance that genuinely empower the organizations and women involved.

Subject of Research: Gendered co-production and emotional labor in women's philanthropic governance in China

Article Title: The co-production of women’s organizations: party-building, emotional labor, and gendered philanthropic governance in China

Article References: Han, L., & Hong, Y. (2026). The co-production of women’s organizations: party-building, emotional labor, and gendered philanthropic governance in China. Global Public Policy and Governance. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-026-00154-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-026-00154-y

Keywords: co-production, women's organizations, All-China Women's Federation, emotional labor, Party-building, philanthropic governance, China, gender norms, nonprofit sector, affective governance, civil society, care work

The research, published in SSM – Mental Health, draws on ten focus group discussions with 80 adult women in five rural communities in Isiolo and Samburu Counties, arid and semi-arid regions that were in the grip of severe drought when data were collected between June and July 2023. The interviews were conducted in the Samburu language by local research assistants and analyzed by a team from Emory University working with St. Paul’s University and World Vision Kenya as part of a multi-country initiative called Strong Women, Strong World: Beyond Access. The analysts used a modified grounded theory approach, applying established frameworks on cognitive labor and mental load to accounts that emerged spontaneously during broader conversations about water, time use, and economic life.

What the team found is striking in its consistency. Across every focus group, women described water collection not as a discrete physical chore but as a continuous cognitive project composed of four interlocking components: anticipation, identification, decision-making, and monitoring. Anticipation began in sleep. As one participant put it, even while sleeping women would start planning for the next day, calculating whether they would have water and how to fit collection into an already packed schedule. Upon waking, the mental sequencing resumed immediately—deciding what could be postponed, what demanded attention, and how the day’s chores could be arranged so that the long trip for water did not derail everything else.

Identification, the second component, involved continuously evaluating which water sources were viable, safe, and accessible under shifting conditions. During the rainy season, temporary sources such as water pans, gullies, and shallow dug wells appeared nearby, offering brief relief that might last only a week or two before drying up. In the dry season, women weighed distant sources that offered cleaner water against closer points contaminated by livestock and wildlife. They layered other tasks onto water trips—washing clothes, watering animals, shopping on market days—to conserve time and energy, and they adjusted plans when husbands requested extra water or when children’s needs intervened.

Decision-making, in turn, was not a single choice but a constantly revised calculation. Women chose whether to leave at dawn, before water points grew crowded and before livestock arrived, even though leaving early meant sacrificing time for school preparation and breakfast. They decided how much to carry, when to make a second trip, how to ration what they had collected across drinking, cooking, bathing, and cleaning, and when it was safe to walk routes where elephants had been spotted. Fatigue shaped these decisions in tangible ways: some women reported carrying smaller volumes of water or returning home earlier than planned because the cognitive and physical demands of the morning had already depleted them—a detail the researchers note adds empirical nuance to behavioral science, which increasingly recognizes that mental burden directly affects the performance of physically demanding tasks.

Monitoring, the fourth component, extended the labor well beyond the journey itself. Once home, women tracked water levels throughout the day, restricted household consumption, ensured children and livestock were supplied, and observed whether sources were drying, lowering, or becoming contaminated—observations that triggered fresh rounds of anticipation and planning. This vigilance was largely invisible within the household, unobservable to those who benefited from it, and therefore unrecognized and unshared. Women emphasized that the mental work of tracking what remained continued long after the physical labor of collection had ended, keeping water permanently on their minds.

Woven through all of this was emotional labor: regulating fear, suppressing frustration, buffering family members from scarcity, and absorbing responsibility for everyone’s wellbeing at the expense of their own. Women described the anguish of rationing, of giving the last water to others while going without bathing themselves, and the shame of borrowing food from neighbors after a long water journey. They described painful trade-offs between fetching water and preparing food, protecting children and earning income. They also described the emotional weight of watching daughters begin to shoulder the same burdens, and their determination to send girls to school to break the cycle. Women persistently subordinated their own needs—eating last, skipping meals, continuing to cook and care for others after reaching physical and emotional depletion.

The cumulative consequence, the researchers argue, is what they call the mental load of water collection: neither the sum of cognitive and emotional labor nor a synonym for stress, but the distinct product of their sustained co-occurrence. It manifested as sleepless nights, constant perseveration, headaches and lightheadedness, exhaustion, and neglected self-care. One woman summed it up: us women get sleepless nights knowing that in the morning you have to go and fetch water. The load was continuous, present day and night; boundaryless, following women across cooking, farming, childcare, and rest; and invisible, sustained by gender norms that frame water collection as women’s natural, unquestioned duty. Men’s participation was widely viewed as culturally inappropriate, with men risking social shame even for carrying a container a short distance, so women performed the work without household support—even as pregnant women faced risks including miscarriage from the weight of jerricans or sudden flight from wildlife.

The findings place rural Kenyan women’s experiences within a growing global literature linking water insecurity to anxiety, depression, and psychosocial distress, from Bolivia and Ethiopia to Uganda and India. But they extend that literature by demonstrating that the four components of cognitive labor documented in higher-income household research intensify under conditions of scarcity, seasonal variability, physical danger, and infrastructure failure, demanding constant recalibration that comparatively stable domestic settings do not. The burden, the authors stress, is not incidental but structurally produced by the gendered assignment of water responsibility, and it accumulates across the life course, beginning in childhood and intensifying during pregnancy and postpartum periods.

Yet the study also found buffers. Social networks softened the load: women walked to the river in groups, chatting, sharing information about water availability, coordinating decisions, and releasing stress through companionship that sometimes offered the only social connection in isolated homesteads. Membership in women’s groups provided practical help and belonging. These supports did not eliminate the hardship, the researchers note, but they made daily water work more bearable and emotionally sustainable.

The implications reach beyond Kenya. Globally, 1.8 billion people rely on off-premises water sources, and in seven out of ten households that must collect water, women and girls bear primary responsibility. Prior research using smartwatches and scales found that women in four countries walked an average of 3.5 kilometers and expended 231 kilocalories per collection trip; separate survey data show women have 1.5 times higher odds than men of reporting a water-fetching injury, with falls on dangerous terrain the predominant mechanism. The new study insists that the true burden cannot be measured in distance walked or weight carried alone. Improving water access through infrastructure that delivers safe water to the household could substantially reduce physical, cognitive, and emotional labor, and the authors argue for greater representation of women in water governance and leadership, alongside the application of frameworks such as the International Labour Organization’s 5Rs—recognizing, reducing, redistributing, rewarding, and representing unpaid care work. Until such change arrives, the researchers conclude, water collection must be recognized as a complex, gendered system of labor that shapes women’s time, energy, identities, and mental health—a burden they carry because, as they said repeatedly, everything depends on them.

Subject of Research: The cognitive and emotional labor of water collection and management among women in rural Kenya

Article Title: ‘Everything depends on us’: The cognitive and emotional labor of water collection and management in rural kenya

Article References: Dessalegn, B., Ogutu, E., Mink, T., Patrick, M., Sinharoy, S. S., Atandi, E., Mwangi, P., Koome, P., Onyango, R. O., Otuya, P., Ruto, P., & Caruso, B. A. (2026). ‘Everything depends on us’: The cognitive and emotional labor of water collection and management in rural kenya. SSM – Mental Health, 10, Article 100702. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100702

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100702

Keywords: water insecurity, cognitive labor, emotional labor, mental load, gender norms, rural Kenya, water collection, unpaid care work, mental health, WASH, Samburu, drought