Documents Büchs, Milena 9 results

"The newly emerging concept of sustainable welfare refers to welfare systems which aim to satisfy everyone's needs within planetary boundaries and to decouple the welfare-growth nexus. Both Universal Basic Income (UBI) and Universal Basic Services (UBS) have been discussed as suitable, but potentially competing, approaches that could support sustainable welfare. This paper contributes to this debate by asking how UBI and UBS compare in relation to four sustainable welfare criteria: a) planetary boundaries, b) needs satisfaction, c) fair distribution, and d) democratic governance. The paper argues that UBI and UBS are not so much conflicting but complementary approaches for supporting sustainable welfare. UBI focuses on the consumption side of the economy while UBS addresses the production side more directly, both of which would be relevant in any sustainable welfare system. Sustainable welfare outcomes of UBI and UBS would be shaped by the institutional contexts within which they operate, especially by the governance of markets, collective provisioning systems and decision-making at all levels. More attention needs to be paid to these institutional contexts when discussing potential sustainable welfare outcomes of UBI and UBS."

"This book presents a detailed and critical discussion about how human wellbeing can be maintained and improved in a postgrowth era. It highlights the close links between economic growth, market capitalism, and the welfare state demonstrating that, in many ways, wellbeing outcomes currently depend on the growth paradigm. Here the authors argue that notions of basic human needs deserve greater emphasis in debates on postgrowth because they are more compatible with limits to growth. Drawing on theories of social practices, the book explores structural barriers to transitions to a postgrowth society, and ends with suggestions for policies and institutions that could support wellbeing in the context of postgrowth. This thought-provoking work makes a valuable contribution to debates surrounding climate change, sustainability, welfare states and inequality and will appeal to students and scholars of social policy, sociology, political science, economics, political ecology and human geography."

"One of the main challenges of sustainable welfare is to design welfare systems that are “growth resilient” or independent of economic growth. When the sustainable welfare literature discusses the relationship between welfare states and economic growth, it mostly focuses on the growth dependency of welfare states. This is undoubtedly an important component. However, I argue in this contribution that the relationship between welfare states and growth is bidirectional. Hence, it is equally important to understand the various roles that welfare states can play for economic growth, as some of the earlier welfare state literature has argued. Welfare states and growth can influence each other in both negative and positive ways depending on the context and on the time horizon that one focuses on. Designing sustainable welfare systems will only be possible if we acknowledge the mutual and complex dependencies between welfare states and economic growth and if we seek to reduce the mutual dependencies between them."

"Despite substantial attention within the fields of public and planetary health on developing an economic system that benefits both people's health and the environment, heterodox economic schools of thought have received little attention within these fields. Ecological economics is a school of thought with particular relevance to public and planetary health. In this article, we discuss implications of key ecological economics ideas for public and planetary health, especially those related to critiques of gross domestic product as a measure of progress and economic growth as the dominant goal for economic and policy decision making. We suggest that ecological economics aligns well with public health goals, including concern for equality and redistribution. Ecological economics offers an opportunity to make the transition to an economic system that is designed to promote human and planetary health from the outset, rather than one where social and environmental externalities must be constantly corrected after the fact. Important ideas from ecological economics include the use of a multidimensional framework to evaluate economic and social performance, the prioritisation of wellbeing and environmental goals in decision making, policy design and evaluation that take complex relationships into account, and the role of provisioning systems (the physical and social systems that link resource use and social outcomes). We discuss possible interventions at the national scale that could promote public health and that align with the prioritisation of social and ecological objectives, including universal basic income or services and sovereign money creation. Overall, we lay the foundations for additional integration of ecological economics principles and pluralist economic thinking into public and planetary health scholarship and practice."

"Financial compensations are often proposed to address regressive distributional impacts of carbon taxes. While financial compensations have shown to benefit vulnerable groups distributionally, little is known about their impacts on emission reduction or needs satisfaction. A potential problem with cash compensations is that if households spend this money back into the economy while no additional decarbonisation policies are implemented, emission reductions that arose from the tax may at least partly be reversed. In this letter, we compare the emission savings and impacts on fuel and transport poverty of two compensation options for carbon taxes in 27 European countries. The first option consists of equal per capita rebates for home energy and motor fuel taxes. The second option is the provision of universal green vouchers for renewable electricity and public transport, supported by additional investments in green infrastructures to meet increased demand for such green consumption. Results show that the first option of tax rebates only supports small emission reductions. In contrast, universal green vouchers with expanded green infrastructures would reduce home energy emissions by 92.3 MtCO2e or 13.4%, and motor fuel emissions by 177.5 MtCO2e or 23.8%. If green vouchers and infrastructure were provided without a prior tax, emission savings would be slightly lower compared to the 'tax and voucher' scheme, but fuel and transport poverty would drop by 4.1 and 2.2 percentage points, respectively. In contrast, taxes with rebates would increase fuel and transport poverty by 4.1 and 1.8 percentage points. These findings demonstrate that it is important to take environmental and energy poverty impacts of compensations for unfair distributional impacts of climate policies into account at the design stage. Such compensation measures can achieve higher emission reductions and reduce energy poverty if they involve an expansion of the provision of green goods and services, and if everyone is given fair access to these goods and services."

"Aviation is responsible for at least 3.5% of global warming, and demand is predicted to rise rapidly over the next few decades. To reverse this trend, air travel demand will need to be managed. An important question is: ‘who would be affected by air travel demand reduction policies'? The answer to that question largely depends on who is participating in air travel, and how unequally it is distributed. Existing analysis suggests that participation in air travel in the UK is highly unequal and driven by richer, highly educated and urban households. However, so far little is known about how these patterns of inequality have changed over time – has air travel participation increased among low income households, e.g. due to the rise of low-cost carriers and ‘normalisation' of air travel as a social practice? Would these groups therefore now be more affected by flight taxes or frequent flyer levies? To address these questions, this paper examines trends in air travel inequality between 2001 and 2018 in the UK based on two representative surveys, providing the first micro-level analysis of air travel inequality over time for this country. We find that while disadvantaged groups have contributed to the expansion of air travel over the past two decades, they remain far less likely to be affected by air travel demand management policies because air travel inequality is still at a very high level. These findings challenge common discourses that present air travel as a widespread norm, and demand management policies as socially unfair."

"Building an environmentally sustainable economy will require radical transformations of European economies and societies. These transformations – referred to by the European Union (EU) as ‘the green transition' – will have significant social consequences, and may affect disproportionally the most vulnerable territories and social groups. Since the latter are already paying the highest price in terms of climate change impacts and environmental degradation, green transition policies may further exacerbate existing inequalities, and may thus be considered as socially unfair and therefore unacceptable. The notion of a just transition has the potential to ensure consistency and integration of social and ecological objectives and policies, acknowledging the essential role of the welfare state in achieving a fair green transition. Just transition principles can indeed be considered as a blueprint for making welfare states compatible with ecological imperatives and supportive of green transition policies. ..."