POLITICAL IMAGINARIES DA---centering minor welfare reforms and technocratic ‘solutions’ makes adopting the radical vocabulary of care impossible.

In this effort to imagine more emancipatory futures, two aspects seem especially relevant. The first relates to the increasingly urgent challenge of articulating social justice and environ- mental sustainability. Given the insufficiency for addressing the environmental crisis of today’s dominant strategy that is focused on “green growth” and aims at de-coupling economic growth from emissions through technological and efficiency improvements, it is necessary to adopt a more radical approach — a “social-ecological transformation” that is based on conceptions of social wellbeing that reject productivism, consumerism and economic growth (e.g. Asara et al., 2015; Brand et al., 2020; Chertkovskaya et al. 2019; D’Alisa et al., 2014; Fitzpatrick, 2004; Gough, 2017; Hirvilammi, 2020; Hickel, 2021; Hickel & Kallis, 2020; Koch, 2013; Koch & Buch-Hansen, 2021; Büchs & Koch, 2019; Latouche, 2010; Mastini et al., 2021; Parrique, 2021; Rosa & Henning 2018; Sommer & Welzer 2014; Soper, 2020; Velicu & Barca, 2020). This requires — among others — to overcome the predominance of the economic discourse on the future, of its vocabulary and its paradigm centred on goods (de Leonardis, 2011, p. XV). The second aspect is that of avoiding the technocratic trap of formulating welfare reform proposals and theorizing policy “solutions” to socio-economic and environmental “challenges” in a top-down and de-politicized way, building exclusively on “scientific evidence” and experts’ opinions. On the contrary, since neoliberalism involves the marginalization of democratic politics, a post-neoliberal social citizenship should put democratization at its core. In this context, the aim should be to build a “deliberative welfare,” which institutionalizes “discourse about well-being and the good life” (Fitzpatrick, 2002, p. 167). In this way social policy can fulfil its role, which is not only that of addressing social needs through the distribution of goods and the provision of services but also that of improving the “practice of citizenship” working as a “multiplier of democracy,” which nourishes a “public discourse on needs and rights,” i.e. a discussion on the kind of society we want to build (de Leonardis, 1999, pp. 33–34).