The new great transformation: from migration crisis to sustainable welfare

Abstract

ABSTRACT The increase in extreme weather phenomena, environmental pollution, and climate change poses a new major challenge to not only fragile and conflict-affected states but also European capitalist societies facing new migratory flows. In this context, migratory phenomena represent a symptom of the great changes taking place and an opportunity to rethink our life systems. They also pose new challenges to European redistributive mechanisms and new social demands, desires, and expectations to fulfill. To this end, it is necessary to understand the determinants, characteristics, and magnitude of this phenomenon and imagine new strategies for integration. While sustainable development seems to represent the only available driver for producing a new great paradigmatic transformation to cope with environmental degradation, poverty, famine, inequalities, etc., we wonder what constitutes the sustainability of welfare, which is increasingly being discussed today. To answer these questions, the researchers conducted an extensive secondary analysis of the migration data present in the Eurostat database and those of key European institutions. Subsequently, they extensively surveyed the literature to reconstruct the state-of-the-art on sustainable welfare.