Uncovering different degrees of eco-social policy

Abstract

For many years, calls for sustainability and climate action have been growing louder and a lot of progress has been made in bringing eco-social concerns onto the international policy agenda. While the field of explicit eco-social policy work and research is still comparatively small, the growing importance of addressing the interlinkages and intersections of environmental and social policy has been recognized by a range of different stakeholders both within and beyond the political mainstream. Reconciling environmental and social concerns is not an easy task as prosperity and well-being are often seen as a function of economic growth, whereas environmental sustainability is inherently incompatible with unlimited economic growth (see Büchs in this Forum). As a result, the field of eco-social policy (ESP) is broad and encompasses a range of different approaches and initiatives that can vary quite significantly in terms of their underlying worldviews, main objectives and ambition for change. ESP can be the adjustment of traditional social policies to include environmental considerations, for example, through adaptive social protection systems that aim to reduce vulnerability to climate extremes or public work programmes offering employment in conservation and sustainable land management. Similarly, environmental policies can be expanded to incorporate social dimensions in order to become ESP, for example, when savings from fossil fuel subsidy removal are redistributed to alleviate the burden fuel price increases have on poor households. The perhaps biggest potential of eco-social policy lies in truly integrated approaches that combine ambitious environmental objectives with progressive social objectives from the start in order to promote policy that can set boundaries for economic choices based on their sustainability impacts (see Cook and Dugarova, 2014; United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), 2016). It is important to acknowledge the variation that exists within the field of ESP in order to understand different assumptions and objectives underpinning markedly different pathways to sustainability. Utting (2013) distinguishes market liberalism, embedded liberalism and alter-globalization as three ideal-typical approaches to sustainability that differ both in terms of problem identified and solutions proposed. For both market liberalism and embedded