It is critical to ensure climate and energy policies are just, equitable and beneficial for communities, both to sustain public support for decarbonisation and address multifaceted societal challenges. Our objective in this article is to examine the diverse social outcomes that have resulted from climate policies, in varying contexts worldwide, over the past few decades. We review 203 ex-post climate policy assessments that analyse social outcomes in the literature. We systematically and comprehensively map out this work, identifying articles on carbon, energy and transport taxes, feed-in-tariffs, subsidies, direct procurement policies, large renewable deployment projects, and other regulatory and market-based interventions. We code each article in terms of their studied social outcomes and effects, with a focus on electricity access, energy affordability, community cohesion, employment, distributional and equity issues, livelihoods and poverty, procedural justice, subjective well-being and drudgery. Our analysis finds that climate and energy policies often fall short of delivering positive social outcomes. Nonetheless, across country contexts and policy types there are manifold examples of climate policymaking that does deliver on both social and climate goals. This requires attending to distributive and procedural justice in policy design, and making use of appropriate mechanisms to ensure that policy costs and benefits are fairly shared. We emphasize the need to further advance ex-post policy assessments and learn about what policies work for a just transition.

While the social consequences of environmental policies are extensively evaluated in sustainability research, few studies exist on the ecological impact of social benefits and the welfare state. Sustainable welfare is a novel research field that seeks to close this knowledge gap and develop integrated eco-social policies. Within this, researchers are starting to ask how citizen’s needs can be guaranteed in an environmentally sustainable way and how their welfare benefits should be delivered. Should citizens receive a universal basic income, be given vouchers for ecologically beneficial or socially needed goods and services, or be provided with access to socio-ecological infrastructures and services? This article develops a framework for sustainable welfare benefits with six criteria of sustainable welfare and nine different types of welfare benefits that belong to the domains of universal basic income (UBI), universal basic services (UBS), and universal basic vouchers (UBV). Using this framework, existing policy proposals are categorized and evaluated. The advantages and disadvantages of the different types of welfare benefits are discussed and new application areas highlighted. The analysis shows that a successful policy will likely include all forms of welfare benefits, with certain types being more adequate for certain fields and societal circumstances. The framework for sustainable welfare benefits can serve as a starting point for further research on integrated policy design and inform policymakers on the selection of eco-social policies.

Jobs are essential for social inclusion, raising taxes, and guaranteeing the financial resilience of (welfare) states. At the same time, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement, and the European Green Deal require the greening of our economies and labor markets. This paper assesses how labor market policies can green employment. The paper analyses the potential effects of eight different policy strategies on four dimensions of the Taxonomy of Sustainable Employment: conversion of plants and businesses, environmental labor law, climate decommodification, socio-ecological job guarantee, vocational guidance and retraining, distribution of employment time, alternative income sources, and equalization of income. All eight strategies have the potential of greening employment but feature different intensities in the four dimensions. In the light of environmental crises, the results suggest widening the toolbox of labor market policies for a green and just transition.

In housing policy, social and environmental targets often appear to be in conflict. This article examines to which degree the rising sustainability strategy ‘sufficiency’ has the potential to overcome this alleged trade-off between social and environmental goals in Germany. The positions of relevant stakeholders from social, environmental, and housing interest groups in Germany on housing policy are analysed by use of Q-methodology. Four distinct positions towards sufficiency-oriented housing policy are identified. The results show under which conditions sufficiency is a promising strategy to reconcile declared social and environmental targets in German housing policy. If pursued by a coalition of housing organizations and environmental interest groups, sufficiency has the potential of becoming a major paradigm in housing policy in Germany and beyond.

In Germany, at first glance there is general political agreement between the green-progressive camp and the capitalist-industrial centre-right on the need for the eco-social transformation. However, there are considerable gaps between ambitions to implement policies towards an eco-social transformation and its actual implementation. As this Special Issue (SI) shows, the acceptance of green welfare systems or adding social policies to the green transition projects is not matched by substantial policies. The Special Issue offers eight original research papers on ideas, actors and conflicts and multi-level governance of the “Politics of Germany’s eco-social transformation”. Current trends point to a deepening marketization of green policies, a reluctance in lifestyle changes and dissonance in the design of concrete eco-social policies. The authors contribute to a better understanding of the political affordances and challenges of the eco-social transformation in Germany.