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Abstract

The social impacts of the climate crisis and the need for societal transformation to achieve climate goals require integrated research and design of environmental policy and social security. The article analyses the current state of research on eco-social policy and sustainable welfare. Based on a systematic literature review covering more than 1000 publications, the article identifies 20 research topics. Strong research progress has been made on social compensation for climate policies; economic inequality in the climate crisis; energy use patterns in housing, mobility, and nutrition; political conditions for eco-social policy; and varieties in eco-social country regimes. Future research activities should focus on the five bottlenecks detected in the emerging research topics: the reduction in the environmental burden through a change in demand structures by the welfare state; growth-independence of social security; support for socio-ecological transformations by altered financing of welfare states; eco-social insurance and institutions; and ecological mainstreaming in the domains of social security. Discussing the explanatory factors for past research activity and sketching the elements of sustainable welfare states, the article concludes with the historical importance of including ecological concerns in social security.

Keywords

Eco-social policy sustainable welfare climate crisis literature review challenges

Introduction

The social impacts of the climate crisis and the requirement for societal transformation to achieve climate goals open up the need for integrated research and joint design of environmental policy and social policy. A separate analysis of environmental policy and social policy is no longer appropriate. Sustainable welfare is a new paradigm in social policy that ‘aims at making welfare theories, systems and policies compatible with principles of environmental sustainability by developing and promoting ways to meet human needs within environmental limits’ (Fritz and Lee, forthcoming). Eco-social policy covers the politics of and public policies for implementing environmental and social goals in an integrated way.

The article analyses the current state of research on eco-social policy and sustainable welfare and identifies peaks and gaps in the literature. A discursive change in eco-social policy and sustainable welfare can be observed: Whereas a few years ago it was still necessary to justify why social policy and environmental policy should not only be analysed separately, today an integrated view is legitimate. Instead of asking why eco-social policy is of interest, the question turned to how the two issues can be linked. This is also reflected in handbooks on social policy research, which – compared to earlier editions – identify the climate crisis as a future topic of social policy research. However, many publications still integrate ecological contingencies only as ‘climate cameos’ (Ian and Barral, 2021), which mention the climate crisis once as an overall trend or challenge without considering the profound implication for the research question of the publication.

Research on eco-social policy and sustainable welfare is still in its infancy although publications and research interest have strongly increased in recent years. In the rapidly growing research landscape, social policy scholars have so far been underrepresented, resulting in specific research gaps. While the effects of environmental policy on social goals are being analysed quite intensively, the impacts and design options of social policies to promote environmental goals are less explored.

Twenty research topics can be identified, of which the emerging topics are particularly important for bridging the research gap between today's knowledge base and that required for a sustainable welfare state and for implementing eco-social policies. The article identifies five priorities among the established research topics: social compensation of climate policies; economic inequality in the climate crisis; energy use patterns in application fields; political conditions for eco-social policy; and varieties in eco-social country regimes. For the emerging research topics, the article poses five bottleneck questions:

Can an expansion of the welfare state reduce the environmental burden through a change in demand structures?

Can welfare states be stabilised independently of environmentally-damaging economic growth?

How can a change in the financing of social security support a socio-ecological transformation?

What (new) programmes and institutions are required to insure against eco-social risks?

What changes imply ecological mainstreaming in the fields of social security?

Ecological considerations are far from present in the core of social security research in areas such as unemployment and disability benefits, pensions and basic security. Applying ecological considerations to the core areas of the welfare state will highlight which public provisioning systems are required for sustainable lifestyles and how social security and welfare benefits can reduce the environmental footprints of citizens. Promoting sustainable welfare, for example by mainstreaming climate protection into social policy programmes, provides opportunities to strengthen the welfare state. The change from a remedial and compensatory welfare state to a preventive and sustainable one could advance social security development beyond the national level. For example, new institutions and insurances at the European or even international level might emerge and the growing relevance of local transformations in housing, mobility and nutrition might lead to a relocalisation of welfare services. However, if the need for strong social security institutions in the climate emergency is detected too late and given the complexity of social protection systems, climate and biodiversity disasters might lead to underprovisioning by, and even the collapse of, social protection systems.

Conducting a systematic literature review, the article identifies 20 research topics with varying research intensities (section 2). The topics are described and subsumed into five established approaches and five bottleneck questions for future research (section 3). Based on these results, the article discusses explanatory factors for the variance in research (section 4.1) and contrasts the current state of social security with the essentials of a sustainable welfare state (section 4.2). The article concludes with considering the historical importance of including ecological concerns in social security (section 5).

Method: systematic literature review

The systematic literature review aims to identify the state of research at the interface of ecological policy and social policy and highlights promising new research directions. Therefore, it focuses on the five years preceding the year in which the study was conducted (2017–2021). Following established review methodology (Petticrew and Roberts, 2006: 27), the review seeks to ascertain whether there is rudimentary, basic, developed, or even extensive research in the topics and whether there is any specific focus in the research questions.

The systematic literature review consists of seven steps which can be divided into two main phases, which both included expert advice (for detailed method description, see Annex). In the first phase, the publication database was constructed by identifying publications through the individual consideration of all papers published between 2017 and 2021 in 17 international journals (English language) and ten national journals (German language), and complemented with a database on the research field made up by the researcher (including publications before 2017) and by considering relevant publications citing at least one of 19 key publications in the field that were identified using expert evaluation. Publications with a focus on migration or health were not included since these topics are also covered in more specialised journals and would, given the comprehensiveness of the field, justify a separate literature review. After the removal of duplicates, the publication database consisted of a total of 1073 scientific publications. In the second phase, all publications were assigned to the different research topics that were previously selected and coordinated with the experts. For the summary of the results, thematically neighbouring research strands with a similar stage of development were grouped, resulting in 20 research topics highlighting the peaks and gaps in the international research landscape. The research intensity reflected the number, depth, and scope of publications in the relevant research topic.

Results: 20 research topics and increasing research activity

Some publications locate in the periphery of eco-social policy, while others match the core of the research field. The research intensity of the 20 topics varies between rudimentary and extensive and is described for each topic separately. Although several impediments exist (see section 4.1), there is a growing number and quality of publications in the field of eco-social policy and sustainable welfare (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The 20 identified research topics and their classification in terms of research intensity.

Front runners: established research knowledge

Ten research topics can be identified for developed and extensive research. Together these research topics cluster into the following five main perspectives and peak observations:

The social outcomes of environmental protection are frequently analysed and the welfare state is asked to compensate for distributional changes resulting from climate policies. By far, the most frequently covered research question is on the social outcomes of climate or environmental policies. However, in most studies, the welfare state's only role consists in compensating for distributional changes resulting from climate policies.

Compensating role of welfare states: Social policy research has taken a rather defensive and less proactive role in eco-social policy, largely limiting the welfare state to a compensatory - rather than transformative - role in climate policy. This can have negative consequences for the achievement of both climate and social policy goals: Instead of overcoming poverty-induced lock-in emissions through transformative approaches and infrastructure changes, a compensating welfare state might introduce exemptions from fossil phase-outs for disadvantaged groups. This might exacerbate disparity in access to clean technologies and prolong carbon dependency of disadvantaged socio-economic groups, delaying the meeting of both social and climate targets.

Social outcomes of climate protection policies: Together with economic impacts, the social impacts of climate protection measures are increasingly evaluated. Mainly price and market solutions are considered and a rather narrow understanding of distribution and participation in quantifiable monetary terms (e.g. income, jobs) prevails. Apart from health effects, hardly any co-benefits of climate protection measures are evaluated. As a consequence, costs of climate protection are overestimated and benefits underestimated, leading to suboptimal climate protection proposal (Karlsson et al., 2020). Social security research could apply a more inclusive stance on social impacts (e.g. participation, time well-being, security, quality of life) and propose the analysis of more innovative measures (e.g. universal basic services).

Economic inequality persists in both contribution to and the impact of the climate crisis and other ecological risks. While the unequal social impacts of the climate crisis are researched extensively in international studies on adaptation and loss and damage, they are barely considered for developed welfare states. Inequality between socio-economic groups exists not only in the impact of the climate crisis but also in contribution to it.

Social outcomes of the climate crisis: Extreme weather events and economic damage have received more attention than the slow-onset and non-economic consequences of the climate crisis (van der Geest and Warner, 2019). There is also an increasing discrepancy between the socio-economic consequences predicted by climate models and the socio-economic assumptions underlying social policy analyses. In particular, indirect social consequences of the climate crisis, like food inflation, climate-crisis-induced violence or the limited usability of public spaces, are rarely considered. As the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of social groups vary (e.g. by income, age, gender, ethnicity), the regressive consequences of the climate crisis are insufficiently considered in inequality studies.

Environmental impacts of economic distribution: Extensive research exists on the impact of inequality and other socio-economic factors on emission levels. Research covers international country comparisons, using inequality as an explanatory variable for emissions, and studies using income or expenditure levels as an explanatory factor for household carbon footprints or other environmental indicators. While an intersectional perspective is still rare, progress has been made in recent years regarding the underlying consumption categories of emissions (Oswald et al., 2020). Furthermore, thought experiments suggest that climate targets are unlikely to be achievable without a reduction in economic inequality (Rao and Min, 2018). Recent publications, therefore, emphasise the negative climate impacts of economic wealth and the relevance of reducing the overconsumption of the rich (Barros and Wilk, 2021), e.g. through maximum income caps (Gough, 2022).

The study of energy use and energy inequality forms the basis for developing eco-social policies in housing, mobility and nutrition. The topics of housing, mobility and nutrition, and their connection with social and climate policy goals, are being extensively researched. In these three areas eco-social policies are increasingly proposed because the areas are directly relevant to the achievement of climate goals, and at the same time immediately affect households. The extensive analysis of energy use and inequality in energy use is an important stream of contribution towards studying these eco-social instruments.

Eco-social policies in housing, mobility, and nutrition: Globally, nutrition (and water supply) is key to social policy, and there are large synergies in shifting to more plant-based diets for global food security, individual health benefits and distributional justice (Kaljonen et al., 2021). Mobility is the consumption sector with the largest income-related divergence in GHG emissions and also the sector where the lowest emission reductions have been achieved in many European countries. Economically disadvantaged groups, the elderly, children, women, and people with disabilities are most affected by mobility poverty due to insufficient public transport and a lack of active mobility options. In contrast, the use of particularly climate-damaging means of transport, above all air travel, is more prevalent among high-income groups (Ivanova et al., 2020). For housing, the research focus has been on evaluating technical approaches to emissions reduction although sufficiency policies could provide integrated eco-social solutions (Bohnenberger, 2020a).

Energy social science: At the interface between human needs (e.g. housing, mobility, food) and ecological impacts, energy plays a key role in the analysis of eco-social policy. Accordingly, energy social science raises important eco-social questions (Van Veelen et al., 2019). An extensive body of research exists on energy poverty. Lately, energy inequality research has highlighted distributional issues on energy use for basic needs and luxury consumption. Recent studies point to a saturation point in energy consumption beyond which additional energy consumption does not increase well-being (Akizu-Gardoki et al., 2020). Personal energy sufficiency would thus enable compliance with climate targets for long-term prosperity preservation while guaranteeing short-term social goals.

The political conditions for eco-social policy are formed by citizens’ attitudes and alliance building. The implementation of eco-social policies depends on the specific design of the policy, the attitudes of citizens, and political coalitions. The welfare state influences these factors, but the interaction is still under-researched.

Alliances and socio-ecological movements: Based on the paradox that climate protection is superior to the climate crisis leastwise in the medium and long term, but that today political majorities for climate protection measures are lagging, research has focused on political actors and alliances for climate protection. While special attention is paid to trade unions (Räthzel and Uzzell, 2011), only few studies analyse the role of other social interest groups. Recent progress in theoretical explanations of (missing) alliances points to the interaction of industrial relations in explaining environmentally destructive growth dynamics (Tomassetti, 2020).

Eco-social attitudes and voting behaviour: The influence of pro-social and moral attitudes, as well as certain individual characteristics and socioeconomic factors, on climate protection measures are intensively studied (Gugushvili and Otto, 2021). Differences in welfare state regimes influence environmental policy attitudes (Fritz and Koch, 2019; Zimmermann and Graziano, 2020). Approval of policy instruments varies between integrated eco-social policy instruments and policy mixes, i.e., a targeted combination of purely climate policy instruments with purely social policy instruments (Bergquist et al., 2020). Furthermore, a discrepancy can be observed between the approval of instruments and their implementation in the political process (Kinnunen, 2021), which could feedback on trust in welfare state institutions.

Varieties in eco-social country regimes could explain the performance in sustainable welfare goals. Based on the ‘Beyond GDP’ debate, a divergence between individual well-being, environmental performance, and economic growth can be observed, which raises questions about the normative foundations of the sustainable welfare state. Variances in the country performance can be explained by different eco-social regimes.

Eco-social country regimes: Country comparisons show that there are differences in the extent to which countries manage to combine low environmental damage with high quality of life, with countries such as Costa Rica, Vietnam and Cuba performing better than countries with traditionally developed welfare institutions (Fanning et al., 2021). Furthermore, research shows that it is necessary to achieve human well-being in ways other than economic growth if planetary boundaries are to be respected (Cibulka and Giljum, 2020; Steinberger et al., 2020). Depending on the starting point, this results in different development challenges for countries (Roberts et al., 2020). Variances between the welfare state and the environmental state are considered, and typologies of so-called eco-social regimes developed (Gough, 2016; Koch and Fritz, 2014).

Normative foundations of sustainable welfare: Based on an intergenerational and international justice perspective, environmental justice becomes a strong priority for social justice (Fitzpatrick, 2001), although an anthropocentric view dominates, which excludes the debate on the rights of nature. Human needs concepts are primarily used as a basis for sustainable welfare research as it allows for the operationalisation of human well-being and thus becomes applicable to transformation decisions (Bohnenberger, 2020b). The consideration of ecological foundations results in a new understanding of social rights, including the freedom ‘not to have to live at the expense of others’ (Brand et al., 2021). The consideration of feminist and postcolonial perspectives on the welfare state might advance the normative foundations of sustainable welfare.

Bottlenecks: emerging research questions

In contrast to the established research insights, five bottleneck questions can be identified for those ten research topics that are still emerging.

The welfare state, with its substantial share in the state budget, shapes the ecological impact of states. Developing consistent transformation scenarios would include links with the national welfare state and considering options for reducing the environmental impact through welfare benefits. Thus, the first bottleneck question is:

Can an expansion of the welfare state reduce the environmental burden through a change in demand structures?

Environmental impact of welfare benefits: There is, with one exception (Ottelin et al., 2018), no quantification of the environmental footprint of the welfare state. More research exists on ecological forms of welfare benefits, with a focus on universal basic income and universal basic services (Coote, 2022). Recently, an increase in diversity and the level of detail of the types of benefits considered can be observed (Bohnenberger, 2020b; Laruffa et al., 2021). In practice, today, public procurement of welfare institutions already provides leverage for climate action.

Socio-ecological transformation scenarios: So far, eco-social links have been analysed mainly for transitions in sectoral subsystems such as mobility, food, etc., but less so for structural transformation. The current state of research on the achievability of climate targets concludes that without a reduction of material throughput and thus also consumption and production, especially in the Global North, the transgression of dangerous planetary tipping points cannot be prevented (Keyßer and Lenzen, 2021). Recent scenarios put a stronger focus on sufficiency policies and demand-side reductions to achieve climate goals (Creutzig et al., 2022). There is evidence that sufficiency strategies combine climate mitigation with high levels of human well-being (Creutzig et al., 2021) and more equitable distribution (Akenji et al., 2021), making them particularly promising for social policy goals. So far, however, only a few models simulate sufficiency policies at an aggregate level as a post-growth economy (D’Alessandro et al., 2020).

There is hardly any direct research on the principles of a sustainable welfare state. Even if there are criteria to decide when a certain social policy can be classified as sustainable welfare, quite little is known about concrete principles in the design of social policies. However, growth-independence is outlined as one essential factor for shaping the principles of welfare state design. Thus, the second bottleneck question is:

Can welfare states be stabilised independently of environmentally-damaging economic growth?

Growth dependency of welfare states: The growth dependency of the welfare state is described as a key barrier to transformation and post-growth economies (Walker, 2021). Possible mechanisms are inequality and social status preservation in growth societies, dynamic stabilisation in pension schemes and dependence on labour force volume. A consensus exists that social protection must be organised independently of economic growth (Hirvilammi, 2020). Potential levers include structural and sectoral change (Hardt et al., 2021), curbing rent extraction (Stratford, 2020), containing labour productivity or labour volume (Cieplinski et al., 2021), and overcoming the ‘jobs and growth treadmill’ (Wiese and Mayrhofer, 2020).

Principles of sustainable welfare: Principles of sustainable welfare can be based on human well-being, which includes social participation, opportunities for meaningful activity and psychological well-being, in addition to the material well-being of its citizens (Hirvilammi and Helne, 2014). Subjective indicators of human well-being can be translated into objective forms of need satisfiers, which a welfare state can avoid escalating to guarantee needs are being met (Brand-Correa et al., 2020). This seed theory allows a distinction to be drawn between scarcity, sufficiency and abundance by defining upper and lower limits (Gough, 2020), which can turn into consumption corridors (Sahakian et al., 2021). Furthermore, possible design principles in social security design can be developed by overcoming the work fetish, wage-labour centricity and the productivity focus (Dukelow and Murphy, 2022), valorising activities beyond gainful employment, and introducing a stronger focus on prevention, as is already taking place in health systems (Weisz et al., 2020).

While the expenditure side of the welfare state is beginning to be analysed from an ecological perspective, there is little research on the environmental consequences of financing the welfare state. The design of social security contributions and taxation of labour income or capital income, and the resulting incentives for ecological decisions by firms, households, and groups of employees, have not been sufficiently considered yet. In practice, and given the important role of employment in maintaining the welfare state currently, this is closely linked to labour market policy. The third bottleneck question therefore is:

How can a change in financing social security support a socio-ecological transformation?

Financing social security sustainably: The sustainability of the welfare state has in the past been interpreted as financial soundness. Recently, ecological considerations have been addressed in the decarbonisation efforts of (public) pension funds driven by the green finance debate (Autenne et al., 2021). Fundamental questions of financing welfare have been bypassed except in Germany, which introduced an ecological tax reform in 1999. Although pension contributions are still subsidised by ecological tax revenues today (Bach et al., 2019), this has not led to a profound shift in financing patterns.

Ecological labour (market) policy: On labour (market) policy, research differs strongly in the depth of the assumed transformation and work critique (Hoffmann and Paulsen, 2020). The concept of sustainable work is quite influential (Barth et al., 2016) but only a few proposals exist for designing and analysing concrete ecological labour market policies (Bohnenberger, 2022; Stamm et al., 2020). Further research covers environmental protection in the workplace (Afshar Jahanshahi et al., 2021), green skills, the climate effects of a reduction in paid work (Antal et al., 2020), and consequences of work and time policies on sustainable lifestyles (Smetschka et al., 2019). (Stamm et al., 2020)

So far, the consequences of the climate crisis on the stability of the welfare states and the resilience of social security institutions have been almost completely ignored in social security research. Yet, research on the emergence of eco-social institutions is commencing. The fourth bottleneck question therefore is:

What (new) programmes and institutions are required to insure against eco-social risks?

Climate-resilient social security: The creeping effects of the climate crisis, such as more sick leave or a reduced insurance function of financial investments and owner-occupied homes due to extreme weather events, will impact the resilience of social security. Interestingly, substantial research on eco-social work, such as eco-social projects, and concepts for advancing social work in light of ecological frameworks, exist (Matthies et al., 2019). This suggests that the climate crisis plays a more serious role in citizens’ everyday lives than is reflected at a more abstract level in social protection systems.

Eco-social institutions: New policy instruments might emerge, even establishing new eco-social institutions such as personal emission rights, regional currencies, time banks, or climate risk insurances. The increased need for supranational insurance of eco-social risks by international organisations (E. Di Leva, 2021; Kaasch and Schulze Waltrup, 2021) or the EU (e.g. Climate Social Fund, Koch et al., 2016) might shift social security from the national to European or even international level. As a countermovement, the greater requirement for local transformations, e.g., in housing, mobility, and food, might lead to a relocalisation of welfare services.

While eco-social instruments are becoming the new normal in policy domains like mobility, nutrition and housing, which have so far been resigned to the periphery of social policy research, eco-social considerations are far from present in the core of social policy, in areas such as unemployment and disability benefits, pensions or basic security. Climate mainstreaming requires bringing ecological considerations into all domains of the welfare state. Currently, this is already taking place in health policy with planetary health campaigns (Hensher et al., 2019), and in employment policy with sustainable work approaches (Barth et al., 2016). The starting point in other social security fields could be an analysis of the ecological footprint of existing measures and institutions, distinguishing direct environmental impacts through procurement, expenditure and infrastructure, and indirect impacts through incentives, opportunities and rules of the social security programmes. The fifth bottleneck question, therefore, is:

What changes imply ecological mainstreaming in the fields of social security?

Eco-social security during (un)employment, for basic security and pensions: Unemployment has a strong overlap with research on sustainable labour (market) policy, but there is barely any research on employment benefits and the question of whether the focus on full employment promotes or inhibits transformation. Activation policies of the welfare state, which aim at labour market participation - regardless of the ecological costs associated with the job - might even be considered an unsustainable lock-in (Dukelow and Murphy, 2022). Basic security extends beyond the questions of welfare benefit types, such as universal basic income, to the question of if and how sustainable lifestyles are realisable for people on basic benefits. Currently, even consumption patterns at the level of basic income partly exceed compatible carbon budgets (Kalaniemi et al., 2020), calling for policy instruments that overcome lock-in emissions. First research approaches also link the topic of disability with ecological considerations (Fenney Salkeld, 2019). Pensions and old-age security systems are described in the literature as growth-dependent, but models for stabilising pensions in post-growth scenarios are rare. The aging population could even increase resource needs in addition to financial needs (Balsalobre-Lorente et al., 2021), and the systematic inclusion of environmental consequences in the financial perspective of pension funds has not been observed yet (Autenne et al., 2021).

Eco-social security for families, (long-term) care and households: Households are a key observation unit for environmental impacts. Complex decision-making and socialisation processes take place in households that shape the sustainability of lifestyles (Wiedenhofer et al., 2018), and households can be places of change in favour of sustainable consumption patterns (Teubler et al., 2018; Vita et al., 2021). Hence, socioeconomic characteristics and compositions of households, especially the presence of children, household size or disability, can explain ecological footprints (Lévay et al., 2021). The welfare state, through its family and child policies, shapes the division of household activities, the socio-economic characteristics of households, and thus indirectly the ecological footprints. Gender is an important variable of inquiry in this topic (Johnson, 2020; Mechlenborg and Gram-Hanssen, 2020). On a conceptual level, there is a strong strand of research that attributes the care crisis and the ecological crisis to a common cause of structural carelessness (Dengler and Strunk, 2018; Littig, 2018; Mölders, 2019). Parallels between a feminist and postcolonial critique and an ecological critique of the welfare state may not be coincidental against this backdrop. In this context, an increased importance of care work and a change in time-use could be central components of a socio-ecological transformation.

Discussion: history of eco-social research and the future of sustainable welfare states

Based on these results, this section outlines factors explaining the differences in the research intensities in the 20ntopics. By sketching the essentials of a future sustainable welfare state and contrasting them with the current state of research, the article draws conclusions on the research perspective required to bridge the research gaps for social security within planetary boundaries.

Research followed reality: explaining research peaks and gaps

The topics of eco-social policy and sustainable welfare are researched to varying degrees by different academic disciplines, and some research questions have been more successfully answered than others. So far, a Eurocentric perspective dominates in eco-social policy research, with variances among European countries. In the English-speaking countries, concrete fields of application, for example, energy poverty, are particularly strong. In the Scandinavian region, conceptual questions of institutionalising eco-social policy are widespread, and in the Southern European region, transformative approaches are more present. Little research exists from an Eastern European perspective, and continental regions focus on the meso-level of eco-social transitions, such as sustainable work or political alliances. Further factors explaining the current state of research and differences in research intensity are:

Political crises: Current public debates and political events drive the eco-social research agenda. This includes the sustainable development goals of the United Nations, the European Green Deal, the exnovation of fossil industries and their just transition, and most recently, the energy crisis in the European Union and the requirement to reduce energy consumption fairly. Overall, the requirement to solve acute socio-ecological crises provides an opportunity for innovative research.

Domination of techno-economic climate research: Historically, the origins of ecological crises have been attributed to a lack of technological progress and to market failures. Therefore, just 0.12% of the international climate research budget between 1950 and 2021 was dedicated to social science approaches to emissions reduction (Overland and Sovacool, 2020). Only now that technological and green growth strategies are failing to deliver the required emission reductions, is attention being paid to the socio-structural conditions for unsustainable production and consumption patterns. Hence, eco-social approaches are under-represented but increasing in terms of research intensity.

Disciplinary background of researchers: In the social science of climate research, an economic perspective prevails. The dominance of economics in eco-social research has implications for the current state of research, the type of questions asked, the methods used, the research results, and policy advice, e.g., the socio-economic impacts of climate protection measures and the climate impacts of distribution are well researched. At the same time, a truncated conception of social participation (as employment, income and consumption) prevails, non-market activities are disregarded, welfare states are restricted to compensate for the effects of environmental policies, and social security or public infrastructure is largely disregarded in modelling climate action. This translates into biased policy advice.

Justifying climate policies: Most eco-social policies are put forward by environmental politics to debunk climate-delaying arguments and increase the acceptance of climate protection measures by anticipating potential changes in social indicators. In order not to interfere with other departments, environmental policy actors mainly propose compensatory measures that preserve the status quo of social security. Together with a rather defensive attitude of social policy actors, potential trade-offs between social and environmental policy are overemphasised at the expense of dealing with synergetic eco-social policies. Increasing cooperation between social and environmental interest groups might change this situation.

Interdisciplinary research funding: With most research funding and research data being provided along disciplinary domains, interdisciplinary research, such as eco-social approaches, faces a structural disadvantage. While research on worldwide trends has funding options with private research foundations, eco-social research with a strong link to the (national) welfare state is disadvantaged in international research calls. Similarly, the topical split between social ministries and environmental ministries translates into separate project funding at the national level. Funding that requires an interdisciplinary perspective, e.g. in anexplicitly eco-social agenda or in application fields, such as housing, mobility, or nutrition, oftenled to fruitful eco-social research.

Normative limitations among social security research: Social security experts have been under-represented in the eco-social policy debate, leading to a stylised role of the welfare state and a disregard for specific fields of social policy, such as pensions or long-term care. A lack of educational training for social security experts in sustainability research, and the focus of environmental research on the international level and of social security research on the national level, impede navigation in eco-social research. Furthermore, the expansion of the (appreciated) modern welfare states was historically strongly linked to economic growth, while precisely that economic growth is considered as the main cause of today's socio-ecological problems (Hirvilammi et al., 2023). This normative discrepancy challenges (implicit) core assumptions and mental maps of welfare state research, reducing orientation in eco-social policy research.

Research perspective of a rising paradigm: the sustainable welfare state

Ecological crises like climate change and biodiversity loss mark profound changes for humanity. From a historical perspective, the climate crisis will have been a major determinant of institutional changes in welfare states. The results of the literature review can be used to outline the essentials of a sustainable welfare state, translating into a new research perspective on eco-social policy.

New eco-social risks will add to existing social risks, forming a new category of risks that social security will have to handle. Only a tiny share of these risks will result from successful sustainability transitions, with the larger share resulting from environmental crises and the cracks this will cause in existing social security institutions. Welfare state performance will be judged by the ability to secure both new and old risks. Preventing these risks, instead of compensating for their consequences, is one major strategy for preserving the functioning of welfare states. While the prevention principle has been predominantly interpreted in social policy as the preservation of individual employability, societal prevention approaches will become more relevant in avoiding the emergence of eco-social risks through collective action. Ecological protection is the most cost-effective option for preventing eco-social risks.

The welfare state, with its immense leverage on lifestyles, consumption, and production, will need to contribute to ecological goals by greening the welfare state, its policies, and its incentives. Instead of compensating for changes in the status quo, the sustainable welfare state might be transformative. While overcoming the lock-in emissions of poor households, the focus of social policy will shift from poor households as the originators of traditional social problems, to rich households as the main causers of new eco-social risks. Curbing luxury emissions will bring back distributional questions to the core of welfare states. Welfare states might even become social tipping points for sustainability transformations.

In the 20^th century, states sought to eradicate poverty and resolve distributional conflicts through economic growth, with employment providing the link to societal participation. With energy, material, and natural resources shrinking in the 21st century due to ecological crises, the risk of absolute poverty will come back onto the political agenda. A shift from instrumental income support and employment towards direct management and distribution of natural resources might take place. More essential goods and services might be provided in decommodified access and, as can already be observed in the energy crisis of 2022, new benefits might be granted on universalist principles to ensure basic human needs are met.

More frequent crises might shift social policy orientation from a productivity-enhancing and investive welfare state to resilient social security. An increasingly unstable environment might bring areas of social policy that are on the periphery, like mobility, housing or nutrition, back to the core of social security. The national level of the welfare state might lose institutional significance to local levels, where eco-social risks are experienced, and boost supranational levels, which can better insure against large-scale eco-social risks and coordinate ecological action. A separate installment of environmental policies and social policies might give way to integrated eco-social instruments. Policies that still appear radical today, might prove surprisingly popular for resolving eco-social crises and even strengthening the welfare state.

Currently, much research effort is spent on analysing eco-social research questions as they are discussed in media and everyday politics. Being based on these mindsets, studies often overlook what would be ecologically necessary to stay within planetary boundaries and lag behind what would be politically feasible. Along the sketched characteristics, future social security research could apply backcasting to derive the changes required to make welfare states deliver stable societies within planetary boundaries.

Conclusions

The climate crisis is only one of the ecological crises that will have to be managed in the coming decades. The social impacts of the ecological crisis and the need for social transformation to stay within planetary boundaries require integrated research and design. A rich research landscape has emerged in recent years around the concept of eco-social policy and sustainable welfare. However, social security experts have so far been under-represented in these activities, resulting in specific research gaps and a passive role of social security in sustainability transitions. The climate crisis confronts the welfare state with a systemic change: on the one hand, insufficient climate action threatens the established functions of social security institutions with collapse when existing social risks and the emergence of new eco-social risks intensify. On the other hand, according to the latest climate science, sufficient climate protection can only be achieved by applying not only technical solutions for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, but also socio-organisational strategies and distributional sufficiency policies.

The systematic literature review revealed five peaks in the established research landscape. (1) The social outcomes of environmental protection are frequently analysed and the welfare state is asked to compensate for the distributional changes of climate policies. (2) Economic inequality persists in both contribution to and the impact of the climate crisis and other ecological risks. (3) Studying energy use and energy inequality forms the basis for developing eco-social policies in housing, mobility and nutrition. (4) The political conditions for eco-social policy are formed by citizens’ attitudes and alliance building. (5) Variation in eco-social country regimes could explain the performance in sustainable welfare goals.

The literature review also highlighted specific gaps in the research landscape and identified five bottleneck questions that are essential for research progress: (1) Can an expansion of the welfare state reduce the environmental burden through a change in demand structures? (2) Can welfare states be stabilised independently of environmentally-damaging economic growth? (3) How can a change in financing social security support a socio-ecological transformation? (4) What (new) programmes and institutions are required to insure against eco-social risks? (5) What changes imply ecological mainstreaming in the fields of social security?

While social objectives are already considered in environmental policy, the integration of environmental objectives into social security is not yet evident. Yet, this integration could promote social security goals when eco-social instruments are chosen and the welfare state is strengthened by updating it with new eco-social institutions. Considering the ongoing global environmental change, the future of welfare states might be decided by the integration of ecological concerns into social security.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-ejs-10.1177_13882627231214546 - Supplemental material for Peaks and gaps in eco-social policy and sustainable welfare: A systematic literature map of the research landscape

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-ejs-10.1177_13882627231214546 for Peaks and gaps in eco-social policy and sustainable welfare: A systematic literature map of the research landscape by Katharina Bohnenberger in European Journal of Social Security

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the German Institute for Interdisciplinary Social Policy Research for providing research funding for this study, my interview partners for their collaboration, and Sophia Heyne for her research support. A special note of gratitude goes to Frank Nullmeier, the editors of the special issue, and two anonymous reviewers for their diligent reviews and thoughtful feedback on previous versions of the article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the German Institute for Interdisciplinary Social Policy Research, (grant number Research grant for publication ISSN: 2748-7199).

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

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