The following article is authored by Francesco Laruffa.
- Eco-social policies focused on labour market inclusion limit the ability to reconsider current socioeconomic structures and power imbalances.
- Transform policy design by reframing people as sources of valuable knowledge and as policy co-creators.
- Strengthen people’s capacity to imagine more emancipatory and sustainable worlds by offering ways to enter, exit and reform existing social practices.
Polycrises have led to the emergence of efforts to make growth-based economies more inclusive and sustainable (e.g., European Commission, 2010; OECD, 2012; World Bank, 2012; UN, 2015; UNEP, 2015; UNDP, 2017), with responses often framing employment promotion as a key component of reform (ILO, 2015). This prioritisation of inclusion in society aligns with established objectives of social policy, such as helping disadvantaged groups to maintain a decent living standard and empowering people for the labour market by improving their skills through education and training. However, focusing on inclusion also involves important limitations that call for an alternative perspective.
Focusing solely on an inclusion-centred approach risks overlooking the power imbalances that characterise the social order and normalising existing systems. By emphasising those at the bottom, attention may be diverted away from critically examining the problematic aspects of the position of those at the top – the wealthiest and most powerful groups who control essential resources and investment decisions. Furthermore, concentrating on including people in the economy primarily through employment may perpetuate and normalise the current organisational structure of economies. Such an approach reinforces the dominant view that employment is the primary means of achieving social inclusion, without questioning the underlying meaning and purpose of productive activities. This alignment of eco-social goals with growth imperatives requires a productivist understanding of inclusion, whereby promoting employment becomes an end in itself. Consequently, crucial aspects of society, such as the lower position of workers within capitalism and the consumerist culture and lifestyle prevalent in the Global North, often go undebated. Inclusion may then be promoted as a means to maintain the structure and reinforce the legitimacy of the status quo and its productivist logic, reframing people as ‘human capital’ and social policies as growth-enabling investments that generate profits for the financial industry. In order to move beyond this pattern and address multiple crises, we need transformative eco-social policies that redesign our socioeconomic system.
Transformative eco-social policies can be envisioned through the framework of Sen’s capability approach. The capability approach evaluates well-being, focusing on people’s opportunities and the tangible potential they have to lead the kind of life they have reason to value (Sen, 1999). From this perspective, ‘development’ consists of expanding people’s freedom to lead valuable lives. Democratic deliberation plays a key role, requiring collective discussion of what is valuable. Hence, the capability approach is not primarily concerned with promoting ‘inclusion’ (Jayal, 2009) in existing social practices, but instead with facilitating real opportunities to enter and exit social practices, to reform and co-govern them, as well as to create new practices (Claassen, 2017, pp. 1290-1294). Even in employment-centred policies, a focus on people’s capabilities ensures that if a person participates in employment, she does so freely and autonomously, whereas focusing on inclusion may imply that people are compelled to be included, undermining the freedom to exit practices. Hence, capability-oriented eco-social policies would increase not only employment opportunities but also welfare benefits for people who decide not to participate in paid work because they want to engage in other valuable activities. This means that beneficiaries are seen as policy co-creators, rather than as a means for achieving other goals like growth or profits.
Transformative eco-social policies aim to democratise social relations and redistribute political power in society, including within the economy. This requires making room for conflict, as those in power generally do not relinquish it voluntarily. While consensual approaches rely on win-win-win strategies that reconcile economic, social and environmental goals, transformative eco-social policies recognise that making our societies truly just and sustainable demands far-reaching reforms, such as abandoning growth as a political goal, replacing profit-maximisation with satisfying democratically defined social needs as the purpose of production and stopping luxury and useless consumption. Implementing these reforms will inevitably involve social conflict.
The labour market inclusion paradigm – with its focus on including people in dominant social practices – (unintentionally) encourages people to accept social reality as something that cannot be changed. In contrast, the freedom to invent new practices at the core of transformative eco-social policies requires strengthening people’s ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai, 2004), or the capacity to imagine more emancipatory and sustainable worlds. Transformative eco-social policies should embrace a ‘utopian approach’, rather than extrapolating the future from ‘the major contours of present society’. This implies thinking ‘first about where we want to be, and then about how we might get there’ (Levitas, 2001, p. 450), thereby allowing the re-imagination of the purposes of work and welfare.
Education could play a crucial role in nourishing people’s capacity to aspire. However, establishing this role requires rejecting the productivist ‘human capital’ approach focused on facilitating people’s inclusion in the economy. The UNESCO ‘Education for Sustainable Development’ initiative is on the right track, highlighting the importance of ‘critical thinking’, of changing ‘the culture of production’ and of fostering ‘alternative values to those of consumer societies’. It recognises that transformation necessitates a certain level of ‘disruption’, demanding to rejection of usual ways of thinking, behaving and living (UNESCO, 2020, pp. 17-18).
In conclusion, in order to address multiple contemporary crises, policymakers should abandon a narrow commitment to ‘inclusion’, instead strengthening people’s capabilities to shape the world so that it becomes more just and sustainable. This entails the replacement of top-down technocratic solutions with systems that allow people to be the co-authors of eco-social policies. But this approach also has important implications for scholars working in the field of eco-social policy: rather than acting as ‘experts’ who hold all relevant knowledge, academics too should recognise the value of people’s knowledge. Engaging in participatory action research, for example, allows scholars to promote people’s voices in the public sphere, contributing to the reinforcement of emancipatory aspirations and thus to transformative change.
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References
Appadurai, A. (2004) ‘The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition’, in Rao, V. and Walton, M. (eds.) Culture and Public Action. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, pp. 59–84.
Claassen, R. (2017) ‘An Agency-Based Capability Theory of Justice’, European Journal of Philosophy, 25, pp. 1279–1304.
European Commission (2010) Europe 2020: Strategy for Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Growth, Communication from the Commission. Brussels: European Commission.
International Labour Organization (ILO) (2015) Guidelines for a Just Transition Towards Environmentally Sustainable Economies and Societies for All. Geneva: ILO.
Jayal, N.G. (2009) ‘The Challenge of Human Development: Inclusion or Democratic Citizenship?’, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 10(3), pp. 359–374.
Levitas, R. (2001) ‘Against work: a utopian incursion into social policy’, Critical Social Policy, 21(4), pp. 449–465.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2012) Inclusive Green Growth: For the Future We Want. Paris: OECD.
United Nations (UN) (2015) Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. New York: United Nations.
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2017) UNDP’s Strategy for Inclusive and Sustainable Growth. New York: UNDP.
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (2020) Education for Sustainable Development: A Roadmap. Paris: UNESCO.
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (2015) Uncovering Pathways Towards an Inclusive Green Economy. Nairobi: UNEP.
World Bank (2012) Inclusive Green Growth: The Pathway to Sustainable Development. Washington, DC: World Bank.
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Francesco Laruffa is currently Visiting Fellow the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE), London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) thanks to a scholarship of the Swiss National Science Foundation (research project: ‘Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Work and Welfare for a Post-Neoliberal Socio-Ecological Transformation’).
The facts, ideas and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the authors; they are not necessarily those of UNESCO or any of its partners and stakeholders and do not commit nor imply any responsibility thereof. The designations employed and the presentation of material throughout this piece do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNESCO concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.