Eco-social values open space for a post-growth society that solves warming. But it isn’t dedev (trust).

Efforts to ‘green’ social policy and the welfare state have ensued (Gough et al., Reference Gough, Meadowcroft, Dryzek, Gerhards, Lengfeld, Markandya and Ortiz2008). However, there has been no major turn against these disciplinary norms. As such, it is unsurprising that social policy can fit reasonably neatly within what is now the main environmental paradigm: green growth (Buch-Hansen and Carstensen, Reference Buch-Hansen and Carstensen2021). While green growth hosts many strands of thinking, growth remains hegemonic; the challenge is to ‘green’ and decouple it from Co2 emissions. There is room for social policy in this paradigm: calls and plans for, inter alia, inclusive green growth, and particular versions of a green new deal, a just transition, and green social investment can and do accommodate social policy, and entail no break with its productivist orientation.

As a future direction for an environmental agenda within the discipline of social policy, green growth cannot adequately address the extent, intensity and velocity of contemporary environmental challenges. This approach adds an environmental ‘tick box’ to social policy analysis but does not fundamentally rethink how we live, work and relate within ecological limits. Contemporary social policy not only fails to address the inter-locking nature of economic, social and environmental challenges to human flourishing; neither is it likely to contribute to decoupling growth from resource use and from rising levels of Co2 emissions. These are the two key elements of decoupling if green growth is to be feasible. As substantiated by Hickel and Kallis (Reference Hickel and Kallis2020) resource use has actually intensified, growing at a faster rate than GDP growth in the twenty first century. Future modelling studies, from the most pessimistic to the most optimistic, predict relative decoupling of resource use from economic growth at best. As for Co2 emissions, the evidence suggests absolute decoupling in some regions but, in the context of continued economic growth, this is insufficient and occurring too slowly to meet carbon budgets that ensure we stay below warming levels of 1.5o or 2o C. As Hickel and Kallis (220:483) conclude ‘there are no scientific grounds upon which we should not question growth, if our goal is to avoid dangerous climate change and ecological breakdown’. These challenges have therefore come to a point under the existential threat the climate crisis poses. To that end there has been nascent interest and recognition of the need for a new disciplinary composite and domain of ecosocial policy (Koch and Fritz, Reference Koch and Fritz2014; Gough, Reference Gough2013, Reference Gough2017).

Underpinning the nascent turn to ecosocial policy is the return to limits to growth thinking, denoted as degrowth or post-growth, from which we take it as given that ecological limits will of necessity shape the future direction of social policy. Ecological limits not only serve as an ecological corrective to growth-based social policy. These limits chime with the many other ways in which welfare states are ‘broken’ entities in the context of a ßcontemporary capitalism that is reaching the limits of the ‘treadmill’ of productivism and commodification as the organising logics of work, welfare and well-being (Wiese and Mayrhofer, Reference Wiese and Mayrhofer2020). In particular, the social benefits of continued growth are highly questionable. Jackson (Reference Jackson2009) and Wilkinson and Pickett (Reference Wilkinson and Pickett2014), for example, demonstrate the futility of further economic growth for wellbeing and social relations. Higher material standards of living have diminishing returns in this respect and, to the contrary, lock people into an ‘iron cage’ of consumption and social comparison. This prompts the idea of the social limits or a social corrective to growth-based social policy in advanced welfare states. Such ideas are echoed in Raworth’s (2017) ‘doughnut’, which offers a concept of a safe and just operating space, depicted as two concentric rings between minimum social standards and bio-physical limits, and makes clear that sustainable social policy has to consider planetary and social boundaries.

With limited exceptions (the aforementioned work by Koch and Gough, and recently Koch and Hirvilammi, Reference Hirvilammi2020), degrowth thinking has not impacted on social policy. Much of the growing attention occurs outside the discipline; principally within ecological economics. In plainest terms degrowth involves a reduction in ‘material and resource throughput’ to realign economic activity with ecological limits, or with planetary biophysical limits in terms of natural resources and assimilative capacity (Hickel, Reference Hickel2020). There is much within the emerging degrowth paradigm that can inform a post-growth and post-productivist approach to social policy; particularly the fact that degrowth is ultimately an ecosocial vision of a ‘degrowth society’ (Latouche, Reference Latouche2010), requiring a fundamental re-think of work and welfare, and the expansion of many areas of social policy.

While degrowth can serve as a catalyst for thinking beyond the growth imaginary in social policy, it is somewhat of a weapon word; thinking about limits to growth in social policy as post-growth offers a more constructive way forward and is the term we adopt here. There are, moreover, aspects of degrowth discourse that pose blind spots and problems to which social policy can speak. Specifically, while many degrowthers call for state-based action, the literature is typically defined by a skeptical attitude to the state. As Koch (Reference Koch2020:127) notes ‘neither state theories nor policies are especially popular in post-growth/degrowth circles’. Consequently, there is limited attention and understanding of the potential role of the state and related institutions in shaping policy and driving change. As D’Alisa and Kallis (Reference D’Alisa and Kallis2020:7) remark, ‘those who make degrowth policy proposals address them in a void’. Regarding policy detail and coherence, there is much ambiguity and fragmentation: calls are made, for example, to de-commodify work by proposing instruments such as a universal basic income, and by reducing working time, without detail or considering how proposals work together. Furthermore, while degrowth calls for decommodification, its ecological economics base is actually more pre-occupied with critiquing processes of commodification: ‘decommodification-oriented public policies and local alternatives have somehow disappeared from the picture … This is a serious omission given the fact that larger-scale decommodification may remain our best option for a sustainable future’ (Gerber and Gerber, Reference Gerber and Gerber2017:555).