Sustainable Wellbeing

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Discussion

Excerpts from Ian Gough's book, Climate Change, Capitalism and Sustainable Wellbeing:

(Conclusion: A three stage transition)

“Recomposing consumption in this way would take us a step further towards sustainable wellbeing, beyond green growth. But even taken together I believe the strategies could not reduce emissions in rich countries far or fast enough to achieve a safe climate. I therefore turn in Chapter 8 to post-growth as the only remaining option. It envisages a post-growth steady-state economy, the achievement of which will require a prior degree of negative growth or degrowth in the richest nations. The most realistic policy advanced to achieve this transition is gradually to reduce paid work time, and thus absolute levels of incomes, consumption and emissions. RWT constitutes another piece of the eco-social policy armoury, one that can improve sustainability as well as other dimensions of non-monetary wellbeing and human flourishing.”

But degrowth threatens almost the entire suite of current social policies that support wellbeing in a market economy. All welfare states and social security programmes have been built on, and assume the continuance of, conventional economic growth in GDP. If this is removed their fiscal stability and political legitimacy would be threatened. At the same time lower growth would likely drive up further inequality in wealth and income. In this scenario all varieties of capitalism and all welfare regimes are unsustainable. All have been historically based on a high-energy, high growth economic pathway (Koch and Fritz 2014).

The picture that emerges of a sustainable post-growth welfare system combines top-down and bottom-up mobilisations and action. To spread wealth more evenly through society, a range of radical top-down policies would be needed covering taxation and the ownership of wealth. New forms of public ownership and control would in any case be needed, including socio-natural resources such as energy and water. This could involve some combination of state and common ownership. The idea of the natural commons can be extended to that of a ‘social commons’ in order to protect and extend the inherited suite of social institutions that help maintain the social fabric of modern societies.

Much of this will need to be built up from below by resourceful communities. Preventing harm is arguably most effective when it involves change from the bottom up, with people and organisations becoming more proactive: building up their own immune systems, both literally and metaphorically, so that they become less susceptible to harm; and changing attitudes and capabilities so that they are better able to withstand harm by taking positive actions themselves (Coote 2012a). The unpaid core economy, so important in meeting basic needs and enabling wellbeing to flourish, must now be comprehensively recognised and supported both in economic models and in actual practice.

Taken together, Chapters 6, 7 and 8 amount to a three-stage transitional strategy for sustainable wellbeing: green growth, recomposed consumption, post-growth. The current stage of green growth, driven by rapid decarbonisation and improvements in eco-efficiency of production, is of major importance and drives the post-Paris agenda. It is aligned with core state imperatives in the contemporary world, economic growth and energy security among them. But it cannot be the end goal, since it will be environmentally unworkable and unjust.

Yet, at the same time, post-growth appears to be a political non-starter. ‘An industrial system with reduced material demand is not in any group’s direct interest, although it is essential to human survival’ (Allwood et al. 2017). Too many powerful constituencies, not to speak of consumers and citizens, would be faced with material losses. Dominant interests, institutions and ideologies would be so threatened that the idea appears politically unfeasible. It is for this reason, among others, that I propose an interim strategy to recompose consumption in rich countries towards low-carbon necessities. It would begin to confront hyper-consumption and the ideology of consumer sovereignty. It would provide a route from the impossible present to a possible future.

Table 9.1 reprises Table 8.2. It relates these arguments and propositions to social policy, setting out a transitional three-stage strategy to move away from the present system of threatened traditional welfare states within unequal and unsustainable neoliberal forms of capitalism, towards more sustainable, equitable and welfare-enhancing alternatives. It summarises arguments built up through the previous three chapters, including both the new roles for traditional social policies and the suite of proposed new eco-social policies. The final two rows of Table 9.1, added here, begin to relate this schema to the global capitalist system.


If a capitalist economy is to evolve that is capable of recomposing consumption (C2) it will arguably need to develop three characteristics: reflexivity, a commitment to prevention, and a capacity to integrate local (bottom-up) and national (top-down) agency. [...]

In my view post-growth is incompatible with any form of capitalism – or at least with capitalism as a global system. If it happens, the process of moving beyond growth could possibly begin in the rich world: these privileged zones might continue to trade with the rest of the world whilst developing a steady-state economy. But ultimately there would likely need to be a move away from global economic integration by free trade, free capital mobility and export-led growth – and toward a more nationalist orientation that seeks to develop domestic production for internal markets as the first option (Daly 1996; Hines 2017).

However, the future may not work out this way: the sequence of transitional stages that I have envisaged may not come about. Failure of climate policy at the global level could see temperatures rising by 3 °C before the end of this century. Then global warming would threaten the core productive capabilities and overwhelm basic institutional preconditions for basic needs and human security. The geographic spread of these effects would place quite different demands on countries according to their spatial location and their prior institutional structures (Buch-Hansen 2014). But it would certainly transform the nature of political economies and state functions across the globe.

Writers such as John Urry (2011) and Peter Christoff (2013) imagine that the failure of transition would bring about fortress states. These would oversee but could not effectively manage survival in a permanent state of emergency. The priority goals would be adaptation to a hotter and more unstable climate, entailing policies to secure and maintain supplies of energy, water and food. The dominant political narrative would be survival and minimal national welfare. The maintenance of borders and social order would require new policing powers. There would be little scope for any kind of welfare state let alone social investment. For the vast majority, opportunities for human flourishing would decline."

More information

Books:

  • Hirvilammi & Koch (2020) Sustainable Welfare beyond Growth; especially the article “Money, Vouchers, Public Infrastructures? A Framework for Sustainable Welfare Benefits” by Katharina Bohnenberger

(2020) from the recent special issue Sustainable Welfare beyond Growth

  • Enacting Community Economies Within a Welfare State (2020), especially the article “The conception of value in community economies” by Teppo Eskelinen,
  • Milena Buchs & Max Koch (2017) Postgrowth and Wellbeing: Challenges to Sustainable Welfare
  • Éloi Laurent. The New Environmental Economics: Sustainability and Justice (Polity Press, forthcoming).


See also: