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As explained above, the option to implement PI in a deliberately underinclusive fashion does not comply with Atkinson’s idea of PI, which aims to liberate people from the shackles of means-testing. The same goes for the ironclad administration strategy. The essence of the participation condition is to include people, not to exclude them. As for the administrative costs, the critique by De Wispelaere and Stirton (2007) ignores the fact that existing social assistance schemes already include effective enforcement mechanisms (Atkinson 2015). However, it is debatable if they can be extended to cover the wide range of activities included in PI. In any event, for a claimant participation conditions would be easier to meet than the current conditions for social assistance. Since the time of writing of “The Public Administration Case against Participation Income”, digitalization has reduced the costs of benefit administration and made access to benefits easier. For example, in Finland the general social assistance (guaranteed minimum resources scheme) was in 2017 transferred from the municipalities to the Social Security Institution (Kela), where it became possible to claim the benefit digitally. The reform improved access to benefit and reduced the number of those eligible for benefit who did not claim it (Korpela et al. 2020). COVID-19 has accelerated digitalization of social security (Masiero 2020). This is the silver lining of automation for social assistance recipients. However, De Wispelaere and Stirton (2007) make a valid point in referring to problems in PI’s attempt to cover the entire population.

Beyond the question of the participation requirements that a PI should be conditioned upon, there is also the question of whether a PI should be targeted by ‘conditions of circumstance’ (Clasen and Clegg, Reference Clasen, Clegg, Clasen and Siegel2007: 167) or universally paid to everyone. Hiilamo and Komp (Reference Hiilamo and Komp2018) argue that a PI can be compatible with means-testing, although Aktinson’s original proposal saw PI as a substitute for means-tested social assistance but not necesssarily a wholly universal payment. Rather than a payment everyone would receive, he proposed PI as a complementary form of social security in which reformed and expanded social insurance payments would remain the default form of social security for many. In this section we argue that while a PI need not be universal, only ex-post income testing, with relatively high income thresholds, can enable a PI to be administered without stigma.

Atkinson’s key objection to means-testing is that it is applied at a household level, thereby penalising not just the recipients’ efforts but those of his or her family as well. Another important concern is the potential to stigmatise recipients, insofar as residualising welfare through narrow means-testing may symbolically stigmatise claiming benefits as a dependent and impoverished social identity. The process of claiming benefits can itself give rise to what Baumberg (Reference Baumberg2015: 183) term’s ‘claims stigma’ if conditions of conduct and circumstance give rise to a lack of privacy ‘and the feeling of being looked down on by suspicious staff’. This, in turn, can create benefit take-up issues among those who might need welfare the most (Atkinson, Reference Atkinson1996: 68). The force of these concerns will depend on how narrowly eligibility conditions are targeted: whether they are designed to ‘screen in’ only the neediest or to ‘screen out’ only the most affluent. A PI that recognises a wide plurality of participation and which is tapered in line with salary earnings at an individualised, modest-to-high threshold may mitigate these concerns about stigmatisation, while making any PI scheme more affordable and therefore feasible.

Beyond the issue of means-testing, critics’ key objection to PI relates to the practicalities of administratively enforcing conduct conditions. If participation is defined ambiguously, monitoring may become ‘practically unworkable’ and PI may become a form of UBI by default. Conversely, if participation is narrowly defined and strictly enforced, a PI will ‘in practice bear a close resemblance to a workfare program’ (De Wispelaere and Stirton, Reference De Wispelaere and Stirton2007: 526). Pérez-Muñoz argues that this ‘rule section problem’ generates two sources of arbitrariness: the danger that the criteria of participation will be defined to the disadvantage of ‘those who depend most on this redistributive programme’ and that the procedure for determining criteria will be ‘non-transparent’ (Pérez-Muñoz, Reference Pérez-Muñoz2016: 181). Below, we explore how a co-productive approach based on co-creating participation options at the local level might ameliorate this challenge.

Towards co-production and co-creation

One issue that is discussed in the literature is the practical implementation of a UBI or, alternatively, of a participation income similar to the type of scheme that I advocate for later in this paper.114 One criticism of a participation income scheme is that it would be a bureaucratic nightmare.115 However, a UBI faces similar difficulties.116 As some commentators point out, a UBI, if implemented through the tax system, as its advocates often propose, would necessitate significant changes in the tax forms, requiring that even more people file returns, and shifting the system from the current married filing jointly model, which is standard in many countries, including the United States, to an individual filing model.117 Thus, it is not clear that a UBI, despite the simplicity of its description, stemming from its universality and individuality, would be simpler in its administrative implementation.118 Furthermore, as some commentators have pointed out, a UBI would not appear to be truly universal, as those whose basic income was entirely cancelled by the payment of taxes, would likely understand this result as this would be apparent on the face of their tax returns.119

The first study by Atkinson et al. (2017) simulates the effects of three budget-neutral policy reform scenarios of which Scenario 1 is a progressive tax (with three rates: 25%, 35-55% and 65%) combined with universal child benefits (18% of median equivalent household income or 0.3 equivalent factor for each child) and more generous social insurance benefits (raising unemployment with 50% and pension benefits with 25%). Scenario 2 is a combination of a PI scheme with a progressive-tax and universal child allowances. Finally, Scenario 3 simulated a rise in the minimum wage up to the Living Wage level in 2014 for the UK (48% of the median minimum wage of fulltime employees). This third scenario is taken alone or together with the two reform packages. The baseline is the current social security system in which over time means tested minimum benefits increasingly have displaced social insurance schemes providing a replacement income notably in the UK for older people. The policy reforms are aimed at providing an alternative to current policies. The authors used the static simulation model of EUROMOD to simulate the effects on incomes by deciles and on inequality and poverty. They simulated equivalent household incomes for 2014 using data from the Family Resources Survey 2009/10 containing 25,200 households and 57,380 persons. For poverty, the 60% of mean equivalent household income threshold is applied to calculate the poverty head count and the poverty gap. For inequality, measures as Gini, Atkinson’s inequality measure (inequality aversion at 0.5), the mean log deviation (MLD) and Theil’s entropy measure were used. The findings show for both scenarios and according to all measures, that inequality and poverty was substantially reduced, but more in the second PI than in the first SI scenario. Also, the poverty gap was reduced with -20% and -60% respectively. The children’s poverty gap was even reduced with -80% in the PI scenario. With respect to income gains and losses by decile and according to both PI and SI reforms, deciles 1-7 gain, decile 8 shows stability and deciles 9 and 10 loose. The poorest decile gains with 16% in the SI and with 50% in the PI scenario. More than three quarters of the oldest households over 65 gain in the SI, but only one in ten in the PI scenario. The impact of the third minimum wage reform on inequality and poverty appeared to be modest, it affects 22% of the households who experience some income gain while it reduces Gini and the poverty headcount with less than 0.5pp compared to the baseline. The reason is that low wages are spread over a large part of the household income distribution and that part of the income gain due to raising the minimum wage is withdrawn from the means-tested minimum benefits. Because women are more likely to be in low pay, the reduction is even less for them. The effects of the SI and PI reforms on taxes and therewith on work incentives are complicated, they seem to raise the marginal effective tax rates and therewith reducing incentives notably in the PI reform, whereas the participation tax rates in the PI reform are less affected. By comparing the SI and PI reforms, some insight is obtained on the different effects of the reforms on inequality and poverty but not on the effects of each of the different components (child benefits, SI benefit increase, PI and tax increase), of the reforms separately.

The necessity of transitioning towards an ‘eco-social’ (Koch, 2018) welfare model is increasingly acknowledged. As argued in several contributions to this themed section (Gough, 2021; Koch, 2021), this will require re-anchoring welfare institutions in a ‘postproductivist’ architecture wherein income supports and public services are targeted at meeting essential needs rather than catalysing labour productivity and economic growth. While there is now a growing consensus about the need for such an eco-social policy agenda, there is far less agreement about what specific social policies might contribute to this reorientation. The role of social policy in enabling sustainable transitions remains marginal within the literature on decarbonisation (Bohnenberger, 2020) while the ecological impacts of social policies remain ‘largely ignored’ (Koch, 2018: 42) within mainstream social policy debates (Stamm et al., 2020). To rectify this double neglect, we revise the concept of a ‘participation income’ (PI) (Atkinson, 1996), positioning it as a form of ‘green conditional basic income’ (Bohnenberger, 2020: 596) that retains a commitment to the principle of reciprocity but affirms forms of reproductive and ecological labour (care for people, the environment and social-democratic institutions), and not just paid employment, as fulfilling participation requirements.

While early proposals positioned PI as a political compromise between the selectivism of workfarist social assistance and the unconditionality of universal basic income (UBI) – a tactical accommodation that could clear the path towards unconditional welfare (Atkinson, 1996) – we advocate for PI as an important reform in its own right that aligns with a capabilities-oriented eco-social policy framework (McGann and Murphy, 2021). Building on these arguments, we advance a tactical proposal for an eco-social PI, working on two dimensions. First, we reinforce the normative framework that underlines this proposal combining the capability approach (CA) with the ‘ethics of care’. In this context, we argue that an eco-social PI should re-shape the focus of social policy on individuals’ capability to ‘take care of the world’, thereby shifting the emphasis from production and employment to social reproduction and environmental reparation (Laruffa, 2021). Second, we strengthen the proposal of an eco-social PI demonstrating how it might be implemented from an administrative and political perspective. In so doing, we respond to two critiques of PI: those relating to the difficulty of implementing it administratively (because of its complexity and costs) and those pointing to the risk that a PI constitutes either an arbitrary and confusing or invasive and stigmatising policy (e.g., De Wispelaere and Stirton, 2007). To address these concerns, we argue that it is essential that citizens are involved in processes of co-production, whereby they actively participate in co-creating the participation requirements entailed in PI.

Universal basic income is the idea of ‘an income unconditionally paid to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement’ (Van Parijs, 1992: 3). Everyone receives a fixed amount of money from the government, regardless of whether they are rich or poor and regardless of whether they do or do not work. While this seemingly utopian idea of handing out ‘money for nothing’ has always been controversial, it is difficult to disagree with the claim that basic income is ‘becoming the idea du jour in the battle over reinvigorating the welfare state’ (De Wispelaere and Stirton, 2017: 298). Though no one can be sure whether basic income is in fact the best idea to organize social policy, it is at least certain that everyone is constantly talking about it – the World Bank, not the most likely supporter of utopian ideas, has just published a major report on the issue (Gentilini et al., 2020).

The academic social policy debate on basic income is well captured in a recent GSP Forum. According to Lacey (2017), basic income’s rejection of both conditionality and means testing stands in ‘glaring contrast with neoliberal poverty tools’. Schulz (2017: 90) expands on this view, adding that basic income might help social security systems to handle issues like the ‘increase of inequality and persistence of gender inequality, recurring economic and financial crises, technological change and globalization and their effects on jobs [. . .] and social protection, demographic evolution, and migration patterns’. Against these claims about positive effects of basic income, Jackson (2017: 103–104) counters that this overambitious ‘great leap forward’ may instead ‘risk jeopardizing past gains, such as income security via full employment, a regulated job market, and decommodification via universal public and social services’. Finally, von Gliszczynski (2017: 98) points out that ‘a mismatch between fundamental ideas in global discourses and the idea of [basic income], and lack of a clear policy model supported by evidence’ leads international organizations to largely neglect basic income in favor of other policies. Judging from the GSP Forum, social policy scholars seem to be about as divided on basic income as everyone else (see Widerquist et al., 2013 for the general debate).

Proposals to pay everyone in society a “basic income” are, on their face, straightforward. The same sum would be paid, absolutely unconditionally, to everyone in society – regardless of their work performance, income, needs or any other personal characteristics. Of course, people might supplement this basic income in various ways, typically with earned income. But it would make no difference to the “basic income” you receive whether you were young or old, in work or out of it, willing to work or unwilling or unable to do so, married or single, had dependents or not, or whatever. Every individual in society would be guaranteed the same basic sum, regardless.

It is in this backdrop that Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a poverty alleviation and redistribution method is gaining currency in India as an alternative to the dehumanizing means tested policies. UBI is premised on the idea that a just society needs to guarantee to each individual a minimum income which they can count on, and which provides the necessary material foundation for life with access to basic goods and dignity. The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) which is a network of scholars, from across the globe, working on basic income, defines basic income as ..... a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement".8

The definition published by the Citizen's Basic Income Trust reads as follows:

A Citizen's Basic Income is an unconditional, automatic and nonwithdrawable income for each individual as a right of citizenship. (A Citizen's Basic Income (CBI) is sometimes called a Basic Income (BI) or a Citizen's Income (CI))

Above we rehearsed Vail’s (2010) ambition for a more expansive vision and remit for social protection, taking into account a wider orbit of social risks and promoting post-productivism and enhanced autonomy. In imagining how social security or cash transfers can facilitate transition to new forms of decommodified sustainable participation we follow Raworth’s (2017) and Büchs’ (Reference Büchs2021) logic, seeking to ensure income support is designed and delivered to meet individual needs and societal goals but staying within ecological limits. Ecosocial policy debate, where it focuses on cash transfers, has been dominated by proposals for unconditional Universal Basic Income (UBI) (Koch, Reference Koch2020; Raworth, Reference Raworth2017). UBI is often promoted as a vehicle for shifting to a decommodified, post-growth and post-productivist world but can be oversold as a panacea. There are questions about how it might be financed (Büchs Reference Büchs2021) and its full implementation could distract from and substitute investment in core public services (Coote and Percy Reference Coote and Percy2020). From an ecosocial policy perspective often libertarian-leaning UBI propositions seek unconditional maximisation of individuals’ freedom over their consumptive choices; arguments which can overlook potential for wasteful and individual over-consumption and ignore the potential of collective social and public services. UBI’s untargeted orientation also misses the opportunity to use cash transfers to target societal goals including democratic, care and ecological participation (Murphy and McGann, Reference Murphy and McGann2020). Instead, we argue that Participation Income (PI), a targeted income support enabling engagement in social, ecological and democratic activity that fosters sustainable outcomes, might better enable transition to a decommodified, post-growth and post-productivist future, and better complement a universal provision of social services, erode consumerism, and foster solidaristic and sustainable lives.

Crucial to this is understanding income transfer programmes not only as cash but as tools to motivate people to engage in socially valuable activities including care and ecological activity (Pérez-Muñoz, Reference Pérez-Muñoz2018). Contemporary welfare models, based on social insurance and/or means testing, are overly prescriptive requiring that claimants meet productivist conditions of eligibility, entitlement and conduct and are embedded in the logic of growth. By contrast, PI has capacity to promote ecologically sustainable participation, outcomes and lives. Atkinson (Reference Atkinson1996) argued PI, as a halfway house, was a politically feasible variant of income reform. PI, transitional or long term, enables us to reimagine an enhanced societal reciprocity and interdependence. Gender equality as a goal of a reimagined ecosocial policy is also facilitated by income support reform that individualises entitlement, removing the application of means-testing households in male-breadwinner systems (which denies women individual entitlement, autonomy and equality).

Humanity currently faces several challenges that will require the cooperation of governments and people around the world. Unfortunately, today’s institutions have largely been unresponsive to many of the threats faced by humanity. In cases were institutions have responded, actions have usually been insufficient to address the issue.

While the impact of civic engagement cannot be divorced from current entrenched power structures such as special interest groups and powerful industries, this article only examines the scale of issues that humans must tackle and why civic engagement is so important for the survival of humanity.

In contrast to the current (work-related) activity-testing of payments, a PI would substantially widen the range and variety of options that are recognised as valued contributions. Pérez-Muñoz, for example, envisages conditioning PI on the performance of ‘civic service programmes’ ranging from neighbourhood clean-ups, environmental protection and gardening projects, educational programmes, and ‘volunteering in homeless shelters’ (Reference Pérez-Muñoz2016: 175). Swaton (Reference Swaton2018) similarly proposes conditioning income support on the performance of community projects such as renovating cultural heritage sites, promoting traditional crafts, setting-up walking trails, raising environmental awareness in schools and providing sustainability advice to businesses. We would argue, however, that the range of activities would need to be considerably widened beyond ecological reproductive work to accommodate other forms of reproductive labour including giving care and forms of voluntary work and political participation that contribute to social reproduction. This aligns PI with the inherent value pluralism of a capabilities-informed theory of wellbeing that Hiilamo and Komp (Reference Hiilamo and Komp2018) argue is already evident in some European social assistance programmes, such as the Dutch social assistance program.

The Netherlands 2015 Participation Act was amended in 2017 when a new Article 83 of the Participation Act came into force allowing six municipalities to locally exempt work obligations in lieu of fulfilling social participation ‘Quid Pro Quo’ requirements. Informed by insights from behavioural economics, Sen’s CA, and psychological motivation theories, the policy logic was that investing in personal autonomy, trust and intrinsic motivation may enhance people’s performance, health and subjective well-being. Obligations can be fulfilled through paid work but also volunteering, further education, caregiving and other health, wellbeing and social integration measures (see Groot et al., Reference Groot, Muffels and Verlaat2019: 284). However, under these municipalities’ ‘trust experiments’ (Muffels et al., Reference Muffels, Gielens, Vos, Muffels and Gielens2019), these participation requirements are neither strictly monitored nor enforced through sanctions. Instead, citizens are trusted to reciprocate by municipalities, and welfare agencies rely on intrinsically motivating participation through offering demand-oriented opportunities that citizens pursue, not out of compulsion, but because they consider them meaningful and worthwhile. Muffels et al. (Reference Muffels, Gielens, Vos, Muffels and Gielens2019) argue the innovative policy which shifts from focusing on people’s (in)ability to work to investment in people’s skills and abilities, opportunities and free choices may mark an irreversible shift in welfare state policy making away from highly conditional social assistance programmes towards less conditional participation or basic income.

While the news coming out of forests is often dominated by deforestation and habitat loss, research published today in Nature Climate Change shows that the world has actually got greener over the past decade. Despite ongoing deforestation in South America and Southeast Asia, we found that the decline in these regions has been offset by recovering forests outside the tropics, and new growth in the drier savannas and shrublands of Africa and Australia. Plants absorb around a quarter of the carbon dioxide that people release into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. With a greening globe, more plants may mean more absorption of carbon dioxide. If so, this will slow but not stop climate change. However, questions remain over how long plants can keep pace with our increasing emissions in a warmer climate. Measuring Carbon In Plants We studied how plants and vegetation are faring by determining the amount of carbon stored in living plant mass (or “biomass”) above the ground. We developed a new technique to map changes in vegetation biomass using satellite measurements of changes in the radio-frequency radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface, a technique called passive microwave remote sensing. The radiation varies with temperature, soil moisture and the shielding of water in vegetation biomass above the ground. We extracted this vegetation information from several satellites and merged them into one time series covering the last two decades. This allowed us to track global changes in biomass from month to month, something that was not possible before. For the period 2003-12, we found that the total amount of vegetation above the ground has increased by about 4 billion tonnes of carbon. Still Losing Rainforests, But Gaining Forests Elsewhere Our global analysis shows losses of vegetation in many regions, particularly at the frontiers of deforestation in the tropics of South America and Southeast Asia. As expected, the greatest declines have been in the so-called “Arc of Deforestation” on the southeastern edge of the vast Amazon forests. In Southeast Asia we found the most widespread declines in the Indonesian provinces of Sumatra and Kalimantan - the Indonesian part of Borneo. However, we found that these rainforest losses have been offset by increases in biomass in other parts of the world. For example, forests have spontaneously regrown on farmland abandoned after the fall of communism in Russia and neighbouring countries, while large-scale tree planting projects in China have measurably added to the global biomass. This roughly offset half of the carbon loss by tropical deforestation. We also found unexpectedly large vegetation increases in savannas and shrublands of Australia, Africa, and South America. Previous analyses have focused on closed forests and did not measure this increase.

Since most species live in forests, chiefly tropical forests, we should take a look at global forest cover trends. Happily, the deforestation rate is slowing. The Food and Agriculture Organization's State of the World's Forests 2012 report notes that the global rate of deforestation slowed from 0.2 percent per year between 1990 and 2000 to 0.14 percent between 2005 and 2010. Between 2000 and 2010, a total of 130 million hectares were cut, but 78 million hectares returned to forests. So globally, forests declined on average by 5.2 million hectares per year—at which rate, the report notes, "It will take 775 years to lose all of the world's forests." It adds, "This would seem to provide enough time for actions to slow or stop global deforestation." And indeed, researchers in 2006 found that more and more countries are passing through a "forest transition" in which their forest area starts expanding. Roger Sedjo, a forest ecologist at Resources for the Future, predicts that by 2050 most of the world's industrial wood will be grown on forest plantations covering only 5 to 10 percent of the extent of today's global forests. One dark blot on forest restoration trends is biofuel mandates in rich countries, which have spurred tropical countries to chop down forests to grow palm oil to produce biodiesel. By one estimate, 87 percent of the deforestation in Malaysia and 118 percent in Indonesia occurred as result of expanding palm oil plantations.

A recent study says there are enough rare earth metals on Earth for new “low-carbon electricity generation” technologies.

Rare earth metals come from minerals found in countries around the world.

Electric cars, wind turbines, and LED lighting all help keep the environment clean, but making them can be a dirty business. The high-performance magnets in motors and generators and the glowing phosphors in LEDs and flat screens all depend on substances called rare earth elements (REEs). And capturing REEs from the clay deposits in which many are found requires leaching agents that pollute soil and groundwater.

Now, a Chinese group has developed—and tested on tons of soil—an approach called electrokinetic mining that relies on electric currents to free the REEs, sharply reducing the need for polluting chemicals. The strategy, described this week in Nature Sustainability, could be “a game changer, providing that it is feasible at a large scale,” says Anouk Borst, a geologist at KU Leuven.

Osaka, 23 (February 2, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EST, Shannon Osaka, “Minerals are crucial for electric cars and wind turbines. Some worry whether we have enough; Minerals are crucial for electric cars, wind turbines, and solar panels. Some worry whether the future supply can meet the rising demand,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/02/02/critical-minerals-run-out-shortage/, JMP)) ***Note --- Seaver Wang is the co-director of climate and energy at the energy think tank the Breakthrough Institute

Wang said that there will probably be enough minerals — and that the environmental impacts of mining them should pale in comparison to the damages of fossil fuels. (Humanity “mines” billions of tons of fossil fuels from the ground every year; even a huge increase in mineral mining will only be millions of tons.)

Recent research has also shown that the amount of minerals required for the shift to renewable energy is significant — but falls well within the amount of reserves available. A study released recently by scientists at the University of California at Irvine and MIT found that current reserves of minerals like aluminum, copper, manganese, silver and more should support building enough wind and solar power to meet climate targets.

What’s more, the mining from those operations would not have an outsize impact on global warming. (One repeated critique of renewable energy is that the intensity of mining might counteract the emissions benefits of wind and solar.) According to the study, the materials required for the transition to low-carbon electricity would take up somewhere between 1 and 9 percent of the remaining carbon budget: a significant amount but one that wouldn’t undercut overall climate goals.

Meanwhile, those who posit the decline of America, and by extension the liberal world order, often get key metrics wrong. For instance, it has been argued that as the unipolar moment fades, so will the dollar’s international reserve currency status. Writing in UnHerd, Thomas Fazi recently argued that Western sanctions on Russia have “enhanced the yuan’s reserve currency status”, while Bloomberg reported that the dollar has reached a “critical inflection point”. Even the IMF has signalled alarm.

However, the use of the dollar is based as much on geopolitics as it is on economics. Foreign investors will continue to use the currency not just because of its incredible liquidity as a store of value and medium of global exchange, but because of the US’s legal and governance infrastructure. It remains, after all, the currency of choice in foreign-exchange swap transactions, accounting for nearly half of the $6.6 trillion daily foreign-exchange turnover. Of allocated foreign-exchange reserves in late 2022, the dollar accounted for 60% of the world’s total. The Euro, by contrast, stood at 20%. The Chinese Renminbi? 3%.