Harnessing welfare state theories to explain the emergence of eco-social policies

As complex challenges such as climate change and social inequality become more and more politically salient, eco-social policies are emerging as suitable public policy tools to pursue integrated environmental and social objectives. In spite of this, the sustainable welfare literature has been, at least until now, dominated by prescriptive studies, paying little attention to the politico-institutional conditions required for these policies to emerge. Against this background, this article aims to help filling this gap, by proposing a set of four theoretical expectations pointing to possible causal drivers and mechanisms behind the adoption of this particular kind of policies. It does so by harnessing the most established welfare state theories and reflecting on their potential and limitations when applied to the study of eco-social policies. Selected theoretical strands – functionalism, historical institutionalism, interest-based and ideas-based theories – are first reviewed and then applied to the specific object of the study, with a view to deriving the four expectations by deduction. The ultimate aim is to generate a politico-institutional theory of eco-social policies, which can guide future empirical research. The article argues that eco-social policies can be expected to emerge in strong environmental states and/or in weak welfare states, in which equally powerful labour and green interests engage in political exchanges, or where advocacy coalitions form around ambiguous ideas, such as ‘just transition’. The article concludes by arguing that only an actor-centred approach based on empirically observable policy preferences can help us to craft minimally sufficient causal inferences about the emergence of eco-social policies.