It solves the aff. While increasing civic participation and opening space for eco-social values that solve warming.

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.

In determining forms of socially legitimate forms of participation we can be guided to some degree by the innovative approach in the Netherlands that focused on self-development (care, education, etc.). However the Dutch approach is still embedded in a wider productivist frame and is less motivated by concerns for ecological reproduction, gender equity, care or democracy. In developing a wider normative approach to determine the boundaries of what might be acceptable participation we are guided by Fitzpatrick ’s (Reference Fitzpatrick2003) counterpoints to a productivist approach revolving around norms of paid employment that generate economic value. Fitzpatrick, in defining a post-productivist world, acknowledges that a post-productivist world will include paid employment but insists this must contribute to social reproduction. Post-productivist work will include work whose social value is ‘moral, aesthetic, emotional and natural’ (Fitzpatrick, Reference Fitzpatrick2003: 96) and which contributes to emotional and ecological reproduction. It should also, following Anderson, enable time for democratic work that allows a more careful eco system to be negotiated, nurtured and maintained. Fitzpatrick intimates that such post-productivist work will often be local in nature, be associated with the commons and will replicate the type of work and outcomes generated in the third sector, social economy, co-operatives and through voluntary work. In essence, a PI redistributes time to enable sustainable reproduction while embedding incentives for ‘breadwinners’ to redistribute their time away from economic production towards socially reproductive labour in a way that a UBI cannot. This is essential for a redistribution of care work and a prerequisite for gender equality. In this vein, Lombardozzi argues for targeted policy to deal with gendered redistribution of unpaid labour around the activities of social reproduction and care provision. In this respect she draws on Sage’s argument for targeted responses as a more effective way to achieve a more creative reform of what many still regard as male breadwinner models; for example, targeted guaranteed income schemes to enable men and women to fulfil caring obligations and responsibilities without significant economic penalties. We argue PI has potential to open what Lombardozzi terms ‘more heterogenous and fluid mechanisms of social protection and public goods’ (Reference Lombardozzi2020: 321). As Craig (Reference Craig2008) argues, much of this reproductive work, particularly care responsibilities, already happens in an unpaid context and the question is not so much how to make care work ‘paid work’ – rather, how to find time to do it in one’s personal life but also how to ensure such work is equitably shared not only between parents but across society.