The climate crisis poses a series of urgent challenges for public policies, and it is crucial to find ways to achieve global ecological sustainability while ensuring human well-being for all. In Europe, the welfare state – with social protection and social services as the two core pillars – plays a pivotal role. Social services are frequently promoted in the academic literature as potentially instrumental in shaping a future welfare state that does not undermine ecological sustainability. However, their role in the transition to ecologically sustainable welfare states has not been studied systematically. With the report “Towards sustainable wellbeing: What do we know about the potential role of social services?”, researchers from SWINS partner Oslo Metropolitan University have begun to fill this gap in the literature.

Theoretical arguments about how social services may contribute to a future welfare state that promote societal and individual wellbeing without exceeding critical ecological thresholds have been developed only at the margins of scholarship on the welfare state. Similarly, there is scarce empirical evidence of services that pursue and serve an ecological and social agenda in parallel. Based on a systematic literature review, the study aims to map and synthesise the scattered and fragmented pieces of existing theoretical knowledge and empirical evidence.

Social Services and ecological sustainability

The study investigates which social services are relevant for the transition to a welfare state premised on ecological sustainability and what they should look like in terms of quality, availability and organisation. To address this overarching question, the review is organised around three sets of questions.

1. Which social services are considered useful in a socio-ecological perspective, i.e., they synergistically serve both social and ecological objectives or social purposes with no or minimal ecological costs?
2. Which goals or priorities in policy design and principles of award should underpin future eco-social services
3. How should social services be organised and with what motivations?

The study finds that literature on eco-social welfare services is emerging and is a lot stronger than it was only ten years ago. Nevertheless, two findings stand out:

On the one hand, the eco-social literature lacks a shared concept of social services and in practice collapses the category of ‘social services’ into the idea of universal basic services. On the other hand, the ecological benefits attributed to universal public provision are largely assumed rather than demonstrated empirically. Both are priorities for the next phase of research in this field.

Policy-relevant insights

The authors highlight several policy-relevant insights and lessons, which can be synthesised in five take-home messages:

• Sustainable wellbeing and equality as guiding principles. Discussions about social services should focus more on notions like sustainable wellbeing and equality as overarching goals, enabling citizens to reach (but not exceed) sustainable consumption levels. For social services to be eco-social they must support a minimum standard of living for all while paying attention to the potential rebound effects and ecological impacts of services that are available at no or low cost for users.
• Ecological mainstreaming of social services in Europe. When developing policies relating to the categories of services covered in the European Pillar of Social Rights, the EU and national public administrations should explicitly consider environmental implications. This is necessary to discover and maximise potential synergies and mitigate tensions between policies to meet the EU’s climate and environmental ambitions, on the one hand, and social goals, on the other.
• Invest in better data. The EU and national governments must invest in public data infrastructures and data harmonisation to facilitate better modelling and comparative analyses of material and carbon footprints of different policy options.
• A broadened understanding and scope of labour market activation. A further key message relates to the acceptance of other forms of activation and participation than paid work. The literature argues convincingly for the recognition and social valorisation of activities that support care for people, ecological reparation and political participation. Hence, the concept of sustainable wellbeing suggests that social services should also support participation beyond paid work. Public employment services are central. They should promote green skill formation and managed transitions out of high-emission sectors, alongside the recognition of care, ecological reparation and civic engagement as forms of activation in their own right.
• Identify existing, low-cost socio-ecological services. The final message is about identifying and promoting promising examples of low-cost services and make this knowledge travel. Public libraries in Finland and elsewhere already lending tools, sports equipment, musical instruments as well as books represent one such example. Municipalities and other non-profit actors that support repair cafés and tool exchanges follow a similar logic. Services of this kind come with both ecological and social benefits. They reduce household material consumption, and they offer access to goods that not everyone can afford, in a way that is universal, free at the point of use and free of stigma, at marginal cost to the provider. Their scale is modest, but they are examples of public services of a social character that deliver a direct ecological benefit. The EU and national governments should help the diffusion of such services, treating them as social infrastructure rather than as local initiatives.

To read more on this discussion read the full publication!