Doing both can’t solve – the unconditional aspect of basic income makes it impossible to incentivize behavior.

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).

A PI can incorporate a broad range of activity (education, care, voluntary work, political participation, life-long learning, reproduction, satisfying essential needs unmet by the market and environmental reproduction), or be narrowly targeted. Swaton’s (Reference Swaton2018) concept of an ecological transition income, for example, targets a decommodified social or ecological contribution. The pandemic has more recently caused many states to configure forms of income support with substantially eased eligibility, entitlement and conduct criteria. While designed as short-term measures some configurations may be disruptive policies with longer term legacies.