Introduction to the special issue: Tackling inequality and providing sustainable welfare through eco-social policies

Abstract

We are increasingly witnessing the social and ecological crises of our time becoming entangled and amplifying each other. The current policy responses from national states and international governance bodies remain within the dominant framework of economic growth-centred strategies. In this editorial, we argue that a new paradigm of sustainable welfare is needed, which includes eco-social policies addressing social and ecological sustainability concerns in integrated ways. We first demonstrate how social and ecological problems are interconnected and why green growth approaches fail to tackle them. As an alternative, and as a pointer to a social security system that can help people navigate the dire straits of increasing eco-social risks, we present the foundations and principles of sustainable welfare, and discuss how this, according to Kuhn, can be understood as a new social policy paradigm. In the second part of this editorial, we introduce the papers brought together in this special issue. The cutting-edge research of the contributing authors includes theoretical and conceptual advances, empirical case studies from different European countries, and transnational studies. Each paper discusses the implications of its findings for European social security systems.

Socio-ecological crises of our time

Today, European countries are faced with multiple crises that challenge their social security systems; increasing numbers of their populations are experiencing personally the consequences of climate change, as heatwaves, forest fires, droughts as well as heavy rainfall and floods become more frequent and severe each year. Such catastrophes not only negatively impact people’s livelihoods, but also cost billions of Euros that could have been spent more effectively, and cost lives that cannot be measured in money (EEA, 2023). The Covid-19 pandemic revealed our vulnerability and interconnectedness with nature, while lockdown measures exposed the fragility of global supply chains and aggravated social inequalities (Eurofound, 2023). More recently, the Russian war against Ukraine is causing severe human suffering and is threatening the security of millions of people, while also generating an energy crisis in countries that previously depended strongly on Russian fossil fuels (Tollefson, 2022). Taken together, these developments have resulted in an increase of living costs for many European citizens: in June 2023, inflation was as high as 6.4% on average in the European Union. ¹

In addition to these ‘external’ shocks, social conflicts have emerged within European societies, related to the EU’s internal aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030. This goal is part of the European Green Deal – a whole set of proposals for transformational change, which include realizing a ‘just transition that leaves no one behind’. ² However, protests such as those of the ‘gilets jaunes’ movement in France suggest that there is still a long way to go and illustrate the ‘potentially explosive consequences of a socially unjust transition’. ³ The costs of decarbonizing the economy are a greater burden for people with relatively low incomes; layoffs in fossil sectors such as coal mining or the automotive industry put workers at risk of becoming unemployed. The existing carbon taxes and a future extension of the EU's carbon pricing system are increasing transport and heating costs, which both make up significantly higher proportions of the income of poorer households than of richer homes. The poor in Europe often experience a form of energy poverty and find it difficult to keep their homes adequately warm. ⁴

In the meantime, the environmental movement has become more radical and has shifted its focus, from the political Fridays for Future demonstrations to actions of civil disobedience by groups such as Extinction Rebellion and the Last Generation. In spring 2023, for example, activists sprayed private jets with orange paint and blocked private jet terminals around the world, to draw attention to the fact that the rich in fact bear most responsibility for past and present climate damage. ⁵ The IPCC (2022: 524) uses the term ‘polluter elites’ to refer to the luxury and conspicuous consumption of the rich, which generates a large proportion of emissions.

What connects all these events and developments? It is the fact that the social and ecological risks are inseparably linked and amplify each other. Economic prosperity, as well as the social security systems in Europe, are built on constant economic growth and the maintenance of a high material standard of living, both of which consume ever more natural resources and energy (Fanning et al., 2022). Stopping climate change and the loss of biodiversity, however, requires a radical reduction in the materials and energy used by European societies (Fanning et al., 2020). Thus, not only must European lifestyles change and become more sustainable; welfare and social security systems also need to be restructured, to become independent from economic growth, with a reduced material and energy footprint (García-García et al., 2022; Ottelin et al., 2018; Walker et al., 2021).

Governments in Europe chose different ways to steer societies through the pandemic. Likewise, there is no consensus around the question of which transformation path we should take when it comes to the future of our systems of economic production and social security provision. The European Union's plan to recover from the pandemic and strengthen the resilience of the Member States, for instance, emphasizes a ‘greener’, ‘healthier’ and more ‘equal’ Europe (NextGenerationEU). ⁶ To achieve these goals, ecological modernization approaches are dominant in European policymaking, as exemplified by the European Green Deal, which holds on to the promise of ‘greening’ economic growth.

Green growth is the idea that the economy can continue to grow, but with a reduced ecological impact, by investing in renewable energy, new technologies, building up green infrastructure and developing new clean ways of producing goods, for example through biotechnology or hydrogen. Regarding climate change, for instance, green growth assumes that the carbon emissions generated by our economic activities can be decoupled from economic growth: i.e. through more efficiency we could achieve increases in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that are larger than the associated increases in carbon emissions (relative decoupling) or – ecologically more relevant: increases in GDP would be linked to an actual decrease in emissions (absolute decoupling). The idea has great appeal because, if successful, it would enable us to keep our current way of living, our wealth and our welfare. However, the question of whether green growth could be a viable strategy is highly contested. Empirical studies on decoupling economic growth from ecological impacts provide a mixed picture at best. Most existing studies investigate sectoral and local examples (Vadén et al., 2020); while what ultimately matters is an absolute decoupling at the global level. Studies show that even if decoupling takes place in certain industries or in specific places, there is no indication that it will be a dominant and consistent trend in the world economy any time soon (Haberl et al., 2020; Hickel and Kallis, 2020; Parrique et al., 2019). Green growth, therefore, cannot be an overarching policy goal, given the short window of time we have in which to accomplish the radical transformation of our economic systems in order to stay within planetary boundaries.

When looking at ecological crises, it is important to understand the concept of planetary boundaries. This concept, introduced by Rockström et al. (2009) and refined by Steffen et al. (2015), identifies nine critical earth systems and processes – such as climate change, biodiversity, oceans and land-system change – and defines scientifically measurable planetary boundaries. Below a planetary boundary, the earth system or process is regarded as safe, while crossing it would imply entering a zone of uncertainty where there is an increasing risk that the system or process will collapse, reaching a tipping point with irreversible consequences. Human activity, i.e. economic production and consumption, has already led to the crossing of six boundaries: we are, for example, in the zone of uncertainty with regard to climate change, and already beyond the zone of uncertainty, in the high-risk zone, regarding biodiversity and exposure to novel entities including microplastics (Persson et al., 2022; Richardson et al., 2023). To stay within planetary boundaries, earth scientists and ecological economists suggest that we should treat the critical systems and processes as global commons and should set absolute limits on welfare optimization (Sureth et al., 2023). The economy would need to be transformed into a steady-state economy in which material and energy flows are restricted (Daly, 1991; Victor, 2008). Further economic growth and expansion, indeed, no longer seem valid options.

Besides the ecological consequences of the enduring growth regime, there are also detrimental social effects. First, there are doubts that growth and the trickle-down effect will overcome poverty (Woodward, 2015). Moreover, without strong and effective redistributive policies, income and, particularly, wealth inequalities quickly escalate and increase the risk of social conflicts and political instability (Piketty, 2017), while undermining democracy (Sayer, 2015; Stiglitz, 2013). Global inequality has been rising and is now close to the level observed in around the year 1900 (Chancel et al., 2022). The current economy, based on growth and the prioritization of private property over public and common goods, is thus producing huge social inequalities. Efforts to achieve more equality within the current system will not be successful or more sustainable if they are based on the very same principles. But there is even more: Persisting economic inequalities and poverty are likely to lead to rising social tensions, resulting in ‘inadequate responses to the climate and ecological emergency’ (Dixson-Declève et al., 2022: 23). The consequences are further societal instability – a vicious circle in which social and ecological risks amplify each other. Fifty years after ‘The Limits to Growth’ were reported to the Club of Rome, a new study has taken up the simulation carried out by the World3 computer model back then, and has run the modern system dynamics model Earth4All to study what is necessary ‘to prosper within planetary boundaries’ (Dixson-Declève et al., 2022: 21). The authors found five factors, or ‘five extraordinary turnarounds’ that would substantially reduce eco-social risks. Astonishingly, only one of them can be brought about by technology – the transition to clean energy. The others can only be created by democratic policymaking: ending poverty, addressing extreme inequality, empowering women and making food systems healthy for people and ecosystems.

In the light of the increasingly interdependent trajectories of the social and ecological crises described above, our intention in this special issue is to launch a critical discussion about the future of European social security systems. We start from our conviction that a new pathway must be laid out for European social security systems, enabling them to stay within ecological limits and to break from their current growth dependency. In doing so, we suggest that the new paradigm of sustainable welfare and eco-social policies can provide valuable insights, new knowledge and policy tools.

Sustainable welfare and eco-social policies

The scholarly community considering European social security systems has long been occupied with questions of sustainability, but mainly in the light of ageing populations, migration and other challenges faced by the labour market in post-industrial service economies, including the digitalization and flexibilization of employment conditions. The questions that have been discussed are, for example: How can the long-term financial sustainability of pension systems be secured? How should sickness insurance schemes be designed to promote longer and more sustainable working lives? How can the rules of unemployment insurance schemes be updated so that people in atypical forms of employment can be better protected? To reflect on the future of social security systems in the light of the multiple social and ecological crises of our time, however, entails questioning the fundamental principle on which we have built our social security systems – the idea of a continuously growing economy. The welfare state as we know it is functionally dependent on economic growth, since it is financed chiefly by income taxes on labour, while social security systems such as pension programmes are increasingly dependent on the level of returns in the financial market (Bailey 2015; Walker et al., 2021). Growth-critical researchers in ecological economics and in degrowth communities argue that we need to set new overarching goals for our socioeconomic system which prioritize direct mobilization of our economic capacities for the satisfaction of basic human needs, avoiding both excess consumption and material deprivation (Hickel, 2021).

In a similar vein, social policy and welfare state researchers have in recent years increasingly engaged in discussing the ecological footprints of welfare and social security systems, and have called for new directions for policy development, in which social and ecological sustainability issues are considered simultaneously (Dukelow and Murphy, 2022; Gough, 2017; Hirvilammi et al., 2023; Koch, 2022). Research shows, on the one hand, that socio-economically disadvantaged groups are more vulnerable and affected disproportionally by the consequences of climate change and by climate mitigation policy, while the rich are responsible for the lion's share of carbon emissions aggravating climate change (Büchs et al., 2011; Lévay et al., 2021). The central question rising from this perspective is How can we make climate policies socially just? On the other hand, scholars have shown that current welfare systems themselves have significant ecological impacts (e.g. Koch and Fritz, 2014), because they increase material well-being and consumption, and are dependent on economic growth, which is coupled with CO₂ emissions (Haberl et al., 2020). From this perspective, the most important question is: How can welfare states become more sustainable to stay within planetary boundaries?

Combining these two perspectives, researchers have, in the past decade, engaged with the term ‘sustainable welfare’. What is meant by this term? It is not simply the name of a new concept or theory, at least if theories are defined narrowly as models that provide descriptions, explanations and predictions about the future development of a given phenomenon. To date, sustainable welfare can be understood as a scholarly field characterized by normative ambitions, in which researchers ‘often relying on post-growth approaches’ seek to ‘prescribe which [eco-social] policies should be pursued, rather than describing what they are’ (Mandelli, 2022: 7).

Therefore, it seems reasonable to ask whether sustainable welfare is a new paradigm in social policy and welfare state research, rather than a theory or a simple concept. According to Kuhn, paradigms are universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners (Kuhn, 1996). In the process of ‘normal science’, surprising results that contradict the existing paradigm accumulate until a critical mass is reached, which would then cause a crisis and ultimately lead to the refutation of the existing paradigm. At this point a new paradigm is created or emerges, which makes it possible to reconcile the old with the new anomalous results (Kuhn, 1996: 43ff). In our view, such a paradigmatic shift might be currently unfolding in the field and the scholarly community of social policy: the old problems of social policy and welfare state research are, for example, how to provide social security, minimize social risks, reduce poverty and inequalities. The solutions to these included, for example, economic growth and modernization, as well as a socially just redistribution of the wealth created in growth-centred economies. In recent years and decades, however, a stock of anomalous, contradictory empirical evidence has piled up: research has shown, for example, that economic development and GDP increases help to improve the objective quality of life and happiness, but only up to levels of relative saturation, beyond which further gains are small and expensive (e.g. Fanning and O'Neill, 2019). Persistent problems of poverty coexisting with ever increasing levels of wealth concentration contradict the promise of trickle-down effects (Chancel et al., 2022; Woodward, 2015). And finally, there is increasing awareness that the way in which welfare states were built after WWII cannot be generalized to the whole planet in ecologically sustainable ways, given the current state of climate change and other serious ecological threats, such as biodiversity loss, caused by the economic development underpinning these very welfare states (Fritz and Koch, 2016).

The new problem is the growth-dependency of the welfare state and related questions, such as how to decouple social security systems from economic growth, and more broadly, how to renew our understanding of human and social welfare in ecologically sustainable terms, over and above the material standard of living. These questions are arguably of a more transformative character than, for instance, the question of how to make the transition to fossil-free economies more socially just. In discussing these new problems, eco-social policies are proposed based on the insight that sufficiency, post-growth and degrowth principles will constitute the economic context of the future. Also in line with Kuhn's observations is the fact that the new sustainable welfare paradigm does not render the old problems and accumulated knowledge obsolete, but rather includes them along with the new: the issues of inequality and poverty persist and sustainable welfare seeks solutions of ‘synergy’ (Dryzek, 2008; Koch and Fritz, 2014; Meadowcroft, 2008) between social justice and ecological sustainability. So what, in detail, are the characteristics of sustainable welfare?

In addressing the interconnectedness of social and ecological risks, sustainable welfare establishes a framework which unites previously separate literatures – on climate and social policies. It aims at making welfare theories, systems and policies compatible with principles of ecological sustainability, by developing and promoting ways to meet human needs within ecological limits, for all people, now and in the future (Büchs and Koch, 2017; Koch and Mont, 2016). The goal is to stay within a ‘safe and just operating space’, that is, below critical planetary boundaries (the ecological ceiling) and above the sufficiency level needed to meet people's basic needs, the social foundation or the ‘floor’ (Raworth, 2017). It therefore builds on established knowledge such as human needs theory (Doyal and Gough, 1991; Max-Neef, 1991) and a notion of sustainability that includes the needs of future generations (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). This is combined with insights from ecological economics and the degrowth movement as to the necessity to respect planetary ecological boundaries and to become growth independent. Moreover, the sustainable welfare paradigm emphasizes that policies should be the result of participative, democratic and deliberative political processes which rely equally on the expert knowledge of scientists, the procedural knowledge of politicians and policy makers, as well as on the practical knowledge of citizens (Gough, 2017: 154). Finally, the paradigm draws on ecofeminism (Salleh, 2017) in its striving to rethink human-nature relations and to promote relational values (Helne and Hirvilammi, 2015). In summary, we define sustainable welfare as a new social policy paradigm which deals with the problem of how to provide human welfare without undermining planetary well-being, by studying policy solutions that aim to create synergy between social justice, ecological sustainability and democratic participation.

Eco-social policies are the concrete instruments which can translate the goal of sustainable welfare into practice. Ideally, they do not just offset the increasing burdens caused by climate policies, or losses and damages caused by climate events. Rather, eco-social policies should be integrated policies that are characterized ‘by promoting new patterns of production, consumption and investment, changing producer and consumer behavior while improving well-being, and ensuring a fairer distribution of power and resources’. (Gough, 2014: 127). Specific criteria for sustainable welfare and eco-social policies have been proposed by Bohnenberger (2020): they must satisfy human needs, support social inclusion, respect ecological limits, leave freedom for individual decisions, must be economically viable/growth independent and give transformative incentives. Others attempt to operationalize the concept in a bottom-up way by engaging a broader public, via citizen forums (Lee et al., 2023; Lindellee et al., 2021; see also Lee and Koch in this issue). Prime examples of eco-social policies discussed in the literature are the universal basic income and universal basic services (Gough, 2019), maximum income (Buch-Hansen and Koch, 2019), a meat tax, or a working time reduction policy (e.g. Khan et al., 2022). While we have used the term eco-social policies here to refer to concrete policy instruments, scholars have also used the term ‘eco-social policy’ (in the singular). This refers to the overarching political agenda, including the motives, interests and programmes of collective actors relevant to pursuing sustainable welfare and implementing concrete eco-social policies (see, for example, Kaasch and Schulze Waltrup, 2021; Zimmermann and Gengnagel, 2022).

In this issue

The idea of this special issue emerged at the 14^th International Conference of the European Society for Ecological Economics, June 2022 in Pisa, where the guest editors of the issue organized a session on the topic in which seven of the contributions to this special issue were presented. This completed special issue now includes four additional contributions. Renowned researchers in the field and from different parts of Europe have provided original research articles which advance the growing interdisciplinary field of sustainable welfare and eco-social policies and help to broaden the horizon for policy discussions relevant to the future of European social security systems. Many of the scholars who contributed to this special issue are active within a newly founded interdisciplinary ‘Sustainable Welfare and Eco-Social Policy Network’ (Mandelli et al., 2022). This network aims to foster exchange on the topic between interested researchers and practitioners, and, among other things, provides information on recent publications and upcoming events in a regular newsletter.

The special issue starts with a paper that provides the first systematic state-of-the-art account of scholarship on sustainable welfare and eco-social policies ( Katharina Bohnenberger ). Based on a systematic literature review of over 1000 publications, the review demonstrates, among other things, that the questions of how welfare programmes and social security systems can be transformed in the light of climate change and other ecological crises are among the least studied topics in the field.

This overview is followed by a contribution developing a novel theoretical framework and empirically testable hypotheses that attempt to explain the emergence of eco-social policies ( Matteo Mandelli ). In a critical stocktaking of the existing research in the field, the author finds a predominance of prescriptive and normative approaches to eco-social policies. The contribution builds a bridge between the long-standing scholarly community of welfare state research and the field of sustainable welfare and adapts some of the best applied theories of welfare state development to the on-going and future transitions towards eco-social states.

Next, Mladen Domazet, Máté Fischer and Alexandra Köves introduce the model of the ‘Degrowth Doughnut’, a modification of Kate Raworth's original doughnut economy model (Raworth, 2017), as a practical policy tool for realizing the sustainable welfare paradigm. They explain how a range of social and ecological indicators are operationalized and visualized to detect the capacity of a country or a community to provide a social floor and satisfy the needs of their citizens while staying within planetary boundaries. The Degrowth Doughnut is a tool that can aid eco-social policymaking at the stage of prioritizing decisions and seeking synergies between choices made. The study uses the Hungarian Degrowth Doughnut as an example of application, and compares the results with the aims and expected impacts of the National Clean Development Strategy of Hungary.

The following empirical contributions are concerned with specific policy fields and country contexts.

The paper by Paul Bridgen looks into the long-term development of the United Kingdom government's policy addressing energy poverty, a topic increasingly relevant to social security. The author scrutinizes the policies aimed at improving domestic energy efficiency and their claimed ‘synergy’ effects in reaching social and environmental goals. The study shows that the rhetoric of eco-social policy ambitions could disguise the failure of the policy to achieve substantive outcomes, highlighting the importance of strengthening social protection systems when addressing energy insecurity faced by the poor.

The article by Jayeon Lee and Max Koch discusses the future role of work and social protection systems in post-growth and post-productivist economies, drawing on citizen forums conducted in Sweden . The study provides a case of bottom-up operationalization of sustainable welfare and eco-social policies, in order to transform working life and social protection systems which currently reinforce unsustainable norms and practices. As specific policy proposals, the article discusses universal basic income, participation income, universal basic services, maximum income and working time reduction, among others.

Working time reduction, one of the most frequently discussed examples of an eco-social policy instrument, is also the topic of the contribution by Kata Hidasi, Tímea Venczel, and Miklós Antal . This policy instrument has been used in the past in the context of social policy to improve working conditions for employees. Today, the ecological benefits of scaling-down production have also become relevant, as well as limiting material consumption in cases where reductions of working time involve wage cuts. The authors enrich the ongoing debate and present new evidence from an interview study of 10 companies in Hungary that have implemented some variations of working time reduction. Their research shows that working time reduction policies are popular despite modest or even unclear social and environmental effects. In many cases, for instance, work intensity was reported to have increased.

Tuuli Hirvilammi, Juha Peltomaa, Matti Pihlajamaa and Sanna Tiilikainen combine welfare state transformation research with the concepts of provisioning systems and transformative capacity, as the theoretical lens for their qualitative empirical analyses of eco-social initiatives in the Finnish welfare state. Based on systematic evaluation of four eco-social initiatives involving sustainable public procurement, a network of carbon-neutral municipalities, sustainable lifestyle accelerators for households and digital carbon footprint calculators, the authors identify facilitating factors that could potentially turn small-scale eco-social initiatives into transformative changes of social security systems.

The question of how to maintain or even improve social cohesion in ecological transitions is the topic addressed by Marta Bonetti and Matteo Villa in their contribution. They trace the conflicts and trade-offs that occur within social-ecological transitions, based on three qualitative studies in Tuscany, Italy . They focus on a) a company in the automotive sector working on transformation from fossil to electric motor technology, including a restructuring programme and layoffs, b) a geothermal power plant where health risks and CO₂ emissions are a subject of dispute between citizens, politicians and plant operators and c) the ecological conflicts in the context of the tanning industry in a district near Pisa. In the conclusion, the authors make five concrete proposals (lessons learned) on how to improve local ecological transitions in the future, to make them socially just and enhance democratic participation.

Martin Fritz and Dennis Eversberg analyze quantitative survey data and investigate support for eco-social policy among the general population in Germany . Looking at the three policy dimensions of redistribution, regulation and rights, the authors compare how different class fractions in Germany position themselves toward an eco-social agenda. They find that the powerful economic upper class and the old working class oppose eco-social policy most strongly, while the cultural upper class is the strongest proponent of eco-social policy. The lower-class fractions show considerable concern about the costs associated with eco-social policy. The authors conclude that a stronger focus on redistributive social justice and on providing eco-social rights in eco-social policy would help to build eco-social welfare states that offer protection in times of increasing eco-social risks and strengthen social cohesion.

The final section of the special issue is dedicated to the transnational and the EU level.

The study by Robin Schulze Waltrup, Madeleine Moore and Tim Paulsen focuses on food policy. While European social security scholarship has not paid much attention to food policy thus far, food poverty is an emerging problem even in Europe. Based on analyses of documents, the researchers trace changes in the discourses about the eco-social implications of agricultural subsidies, focusing on international organizations such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the Word Bank and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. The study highlights the importance of the structural features of the global political economy, the power asymmetries and different interests of actors in the Global South and North, in considering the implementation of eco-social policies. The authors emphasize ‘that logics and social relations such as competition, private property, growth, expropriation and exploitation’ need to be acknowledged and cannot simply be ‘policied-away’.

Lastly, combining topic model analyses with qualitative content analysis of the EU’s official documents, as well as evaluating stakeholders’ statements, Katharina Zimmermann and Vincent Gengnagel scrutinize the Just Transition Mechanism of the European Green Deal for its potential to stimulate the adoption of eco-social policies. They investigate whether proposed policy instruments have the potential to address the social implications of the green transition. The findings show that there is more emphasis on productive social policies aimed at enhancing the productivity of the labour force than on protective, redistribution-oriented social policy instruments. They also find that ‘…Inner-European and global inequalities are rarely discussed together and not addressed as interconnected’, which is inadequate given the global scope of the climate crisis. They conclude that it will be vital to expand a social rights-based policy approach and to address redistributive conflicts, both at the inner-European and at the global level, for a just and green transition.

Key findings

In summary, the following key findings can be distilled from the 11 contributions brought together in this special issue.

While redistribution from the rich to the poor is considered essential for sustainable welfare and eco-social policy, simply utilizing existing tax and transfer systems without tackling the welfare states’ financial dependency on growth cannot be a long-term solution. A promising and resource-efficient solution could be to strengthen the public infrastructure , services and common goods which can guarantee the satisfaction of needs of most of the population at ecologically lower costs. There are policy tools guiding practical applications, such as the Degrowth Doughnut, that can be used to monitor and steer such a transformation.

Key factors that enable and promote the successful implementation of eco-social policies have been identified in case studies: shared visions of an eco-social future leading to stronger commitment and social cohesion; sufficient financial resources; and democratic participatory processes as well as possibilities for self-reflection for involved policy actors. On the other hand, persisting inequalities at the global and national level and powerful economic interests with dominant social positions hinder a reformulation of the overarching goal of our socio-economic system and prevent the implementation of necessary redistributive measures.

Future research could investigate policy packages consisting of two or more eco-social policies which can be coordinated and together aim for the maximum impacts on both ecological and social sustainability. For instance, the ecological consequences of working time reduction are unclear at best, unless the reduction in working hours entails a decrease in production and carbon and material-intensive consumption, and unless it is combined with other measures, such as a participation income, making our working lives more ecologically and socially sustainable.