Introduction. Welfare states confronted by the challenges of climate change: a short review of the issues and possible impacts

Abstract

By the time of the COP21 Paris Accord in 2015, climate emergency was being recognised as a top policy priority by more and more policy-makers and the restructuring process it entails was seen as the main challenge of the coming decades. The welfare state that emerged in the context of a fossil fuel-based extractive economic model, based on a belief in sustained growth, cannot remain unaffected by the ongoing transition to a net-zero economy (Gough et al., 2008). Nevertheless, the different possible linkages between the welfare state and climate and environmental issues largely remain unexplored. This is what motivated this special issue. This contrasts, for example, with the issue of employment and jobs in respect of both quantity (OECD, 2021) and quality (Piasna et al., 2019), on which many global macroeconomic (Nguyen et al., 2022) and sectoral studies (Valero et al., 2021) exist. The main approach is to try to define what green jobs are and what employment creation or destruction is to be expected during the green transition (Bowen et al., 2018). Nothing similar has yet been done for the welfare state and its different dimensions (social insurance, social assistance, health and safety and so on) (Koch et al., 2016), or certainly not involving sophisticated quantitative measurements. But although for the moment there is still relatively little literature on the topic – ‘sustainable welfare’ being one important narrative (Büchs and Koch, 2017), there is a growing academic community among welfare state specialists who are interested in environmental issues. A crude indicator could be the growing number of ‘green’ thematic streams at the annual ESPAnet conferences. At the same time, the socio-ecological nexus is even more overlooked by environmental scholars. Different groups of academics composed of economists, sociologists and political scientists have showed interest, but they are not really engaging in a transversal dialogue between disciplines or countries, not to mention a trans-European dialogue. From a welfare state perspective, a first approach was to analyse the possible concordance or lack of it between the welfare state regimes and the environmental clusters. In other words, could 1132781 TRS0010.1177/10242589221132781TransferGalgóczi and Pochet research-article2022