The River Runs Through It: Naturalising Social Policy and Welfare

Johan Nordensvärd (), Markus Ketola and Frauke Urban
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Johan Nordensvärd: Department of Management and Engineering (IEI), Linköping University, 581 83 Linköping, Sweden
Markus Ketola: School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, UK
Frauke Urban: Department of Industrial Economics and Management (INDEK), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 16, 1-18

Abstract: This paper reconceptualises social rights through an integration of human welfare and environmental welfare. This is essential if we are making a case for the radical policy changes required to respond to the current environmental crisis, such as maximum living standards and maximum income. As living standards and the demand for social rights increase across the world, this will lead to a concomitant pressure on nature. A maximum living standard based on an ecological footprint is a starting point to think about the need to grant legal rights and resources to nature. Following Polanyi, both humans and the environment are fictitious commodities; we therefore need to rethink our approach to social policy and decommodification to include the environment. This requires approaching social rights from an ecological perspective and breaking the anthropocentric barriers welfare policies create between society and nature. Here, we draw on the work of Michel Serres on ‘the natural contract’ in order to rethink the content of the social contract and develop an argument in favour of decommodifying nature. Using rivers as legal entities in New Zealand as our example, we illustrate how this theoretical approach could provide the foundations for sustainable eco-social policies in general and maximum living standards in particular.

Keywords: social policy; nature rights; environmental policy; decommodification; indigenous knowledge; welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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