The history of welfare states is tightly linked to industrial capitalism and a mode of regulation where production and consumption patterns increased in parallel

Welfare states are highly dependent on the economic growth paradigm. Especially in social democratic welfare states, growth dependence has historically been accompanied by the notion of a virtuous circle, which ensures that social policy measures do not conflict with economic growth. However, this policy idea ignores the environmental impacts that are now challenging human wellbeing and welfare goals. In this conceptual research article, I reframe the virtuous circle of the welfare state by revealing its unintended consequences and internal contradictions before introducing a more sustainable policy idea. I argue that this new concept—a virtuous circle of sustainable welfare—could have transformative potential in designing a planned and socially sustainable degrowth transformation. Drawing on historical institutionalism, degrowth, social policy and sustainable welfare state research, I advocate for the virtuous circle as a heuristic tool to provide an appealing and convincing narrative for sustainable welfare state beyond growth. The policy idea of virtuous circle addresses interrelated institutional reforms and positive feedbacks between different institutions and policy goals. It also emphasizes that a holistic approach is necessary to avoid trade-offs and contradictions between social, environmental, and economic policies.

Social policy developed as a research field and academic discipline to ensure protection from social risks in the era of emerging capitalism and industrialization. While welfare states have successfully increased their citizens’ wellbeing, they have also contributed to the ecological crisis, while the shared scientific understanding of exceeded planetary boundaries and worsening climate change scenarios has not (yet) reshaped mainstream social policy research. In this article, we suggest that the established traditions in social policy research can nevertheless provide a solid ground for responding to the climate emergency and facilitating the sustainable transformation of society and the economy. With a focus on four of the research fields that are central in social policy scholarship – risks, citizenship, welfare regimes, and wellbeing – we develop an ecosocial research agenda. By discussing the classic and climate-adjusted understandings of these fields, we open future pathways for social policy research and invite scholars to engage with our proposed research agenda.

The article contributes to sustainability transition research by indicating the significance of transformative grassroots innovations in the context of social work research. We introduce the integrative concept of ecosocial innovation in order to demonstrate how grassroots innovations can successfully combine social, ecological and economic aspects of a sustainability transition. By ecosocial innovations, we refer to social innovations with a strong ecological orientation (e.g., recycling workshops, urban gardening, participatory unemployment projects and new local economies). The data consists of 50 examples of ecosocial innovations in Finland, Italy, Germany, Belgium and the UK. We investigate how ecosocial innovations interconnect ecological, economic and social goals and study the factors of their integrative crucial capacity. On the basis of qualitative data analysis and thematic categorisation of ecosocial innovations, we identify five integrative practices: diversity of activities, successful networking, addressing new livelihood, focus on food and explicit conceptual work on sustainability. Very often these integrative practices emerge as pragmatic solutions to local needs. For the participants, the ecosocial innovations can be relevant sources for new livelihood and wellbeing beyond the conventional labour market. Foremost, ecosocial innovations are valuable as forerunners for sustainability transition in practice.

In eco-welfare states, welfare provision must operate within planetary boundaries, entailing societal transformations and significant emission reductions. This article contributes to the research on sustainable welfare and eco-social policies by examining transformative and integrative eco-social initiatives that aim to reduce environmental impacts while also ensuring that public actors have the capacities to reach legally binding social outcomes and enhance social inclusion. Theoretically, we combine welfare state transformation research with the concepts of social-ecological systems, provisioning systems and transformative capacity. Our empirical cases in Finland include public actors promoting sustainable public procurement, a network of carbon-neutral municipalities, sustainable lifestyles accelerators at the household level, and carbon footprint calculators as a potential free-to-use technique that supports widespread carbon reductions. We apply a qualitative research design to investigate what kinds of factors are crucial in enhancing the transformative capacity of provisioning systems and how various factors in practice enable the eco-social initiatives to support the transformation towards an eco-welfare state. Our findings identify key enabling factors for transformative capacity: social networks, collaboration and participation; knowledge, learning and monitoring; shared policy frameworks and visions; and financial resources. These factors are interrelated and can be brought to bear in no particular sequence. The results offer valuable insights into how welfare state characteristics with democratically governed public actors may facilitate transformation.

Meeting human needs while respecting ecological limits is one of the daunting tasks of the sustainability transformation. To succeed in it, it is vital to discuss, to reconstruct, and to deconstruct the dominant discourse on well-being. How young people understand well-being is a particularly important issue since they are the prospective harbingers of change. However, the public discourse on youth is often problem-oriented, especially regarding youth not in employment or education. In this article, the gaze is directed at one such group. Group-interview data of young unemployed Finnish adults are analyzed to explore how they conceptualize well-being and how this understanding relates to the sustainability transformation. We interpret the data with the help of a need-based theory of sustainable, multidimensional, and relational well-being (the Having-Doing-Loving-Being framework). The study demonstrates that the young adults’ discourse is compatible with the framework, and differs distinctly from the prevailing policy discourse on well-being by giving far less weight to monetary aspects, and by its emphasis on meaningfulness, ethical activities, and connectedness with nature. The article concludes with implications for the sustainability transformation regarding consumption, employment policies, social and health services, biodiversity and conservation, positive sustainability, and the theory of sustainable well-being.