Despite the focus on urgent crises, including Ukraine, the cost of living and the long-running sagas dominating British politics, issues relating to climate change continue to make headlines. Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, used the image of being on ‘a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator’, in response to the ominous evidence and recent dire warnings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Our planet is in the emergency room with human-induced climate change worse than once feared and already affecting 3.3 billion people. Gross wealth inequality causes excessive consumption that fuels carbon emissions while those most impacted are the poorest, and more likely to be women and girls in the Global South. They are also least likely to have contributed to the problem to begin with. The cojoined problems of climate change and inequality have to be understood and tackled together. These complex global social challenges require us to work across the Sustainable Development Goals and towards systemic or transformative change rather than incremental reform. This requires radical research that crosses disciplines and fields, but also institutional imagination and openness to new ideas and new connections between our siloed understandings.
There is a clear need for, and thankfully evidence of, more collaboration across the disciplines of climate change, environmental studies and social sciences including social policy. Rather than techno-optimistic myths of green growth, this research is helping to put flesh on what real sustainable transformation might look like.
One sphere of research, ecosocial policy or sustainable welfare focuses on tackling environmental sustainability and inequality though integrated policy tools. Essentially, ecosocial policy can contribute to a less carbon-intensive life, particularly by distributing what we need to live sustainable lives in a more collective and equitable manner. Ecosocial policy research has the potential to impact on the ground by opening up social imagination so that people can be enabled to participate in and articulate how the redistribution of work, time, care, income, participation and resources like health, housing and education can enhance the real-life experiences of those who are most affected by social issues and who have most to fear from change imposed from above.
Ecosocial policies can include a wide variety of approaches. Ecosocial research points to the need for imaginative enabling institutions in which we are active and capable participants, shaping our sustainable future. For example, work can be redistributed through four-day weeks, shorter working days and socially valuing other forms of currently unpaid work, while redistribution of income can occur through tax policy, minimum and maximum incomes and new forms of income support, such as a Participation Income to recognise, value and reward sustainable work and care activity. Collective approaches to meeting our needs can be found in universal basic services which support a diversity of provision of resources like health, housing and education. These forms of ecosocial policy can enhance our collective freedom to live flourishing lives, meeting our needs while also ensuring a lower collective carbon impact on our shared planet.
Ecosocial research is an important step offering hope and pathways towards positive social change. Ecosocial policy has real potential to transform society, not only because the ideas have practical policy relevance for equality and sustainability, but because they can prompt people to see themselves positively as part of the solution. Ecosocial policies can offer positive ways to frame what many people believe in and want, speaking to reciprocal values. The pandemic illustrated the importance people attach to the value of care and to how people invest in mutually interdependent relationships in family, community and in wider society. Being able to positively articulate what you stand for is an essential prerequisite to inclusive mobilisation and effective coalition-building across environmental and equality interests. It is also a defence against manipulation by those who would rather plant fear in people’s hearts and minds.
Making ecosocial welfare happen requires hopeful and positive mobilisation and coalition-building. It also requires that those mobilising for such an integrated approach to tackling environmental destruction and inequality find ways to engage with the democratic actors who must institutionalise this policy in legislation and implement it through budgets. This synergy of transformative politics from below with what needs to be a deeper and wider democracy with more equalising structures is emblematic of a high-energy democracy; nothing less is needed for the scale and depth of transformative change required.
Ecosocial policy speaks to the urgency of now, it offers tools for us to be ‘ready now’, not with policy blueprints but to face the required direction of travel with some immediate sense of what is required: enabling institutions, universal basic services, income supports that reward socially valued, sustainable forms of work and participation. Ecosocial policy offers mechanisms, ideas, language and imagination, for coalition-building, for those seeking gender, climate and economic justice to engage with and organise with each other. It offers ideas, framing language and imagination, necessary tools for the collective mobilisation and inclusive participation that is essential for building transformative power that is capable of disrupting the status quo. We need more research to advance ecosocial thinking, to promote alternatives to green growth and to support the development of coalitions of the hopeful who act out of the belief that we can accelerate ecosocial transformation. We are ‘ready now’.
Mary P. Murphy is Professor and Head of Department in the Department of Sociology at Maynooth University. She has taught, researched and published on welfare policy and civil society, and is an activist and advocate for social justice and gender equality.
Creating an Ecosocial Welfare Future by Mary P. Murphy is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £27.99.
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