Ecological ceiling and social floor: public support for eco-social policies in Sweden

Abstract

In this article, we investigate public support for eco-social policies combining goals of social justice and ecological sustainability. Eco-social policies contribute both to providing a social floor or redistributing resources to where they are needed and to respecting an ecological ceiling by keeping human activities within ecological limits. We discuss five such policies and highlight arguments for and against defining them as eco-social policies: a maximum income, a wealth tax, a basic income, a working time reduction and a meat tax. Asking what the social and individual determinants of supporting these policies are, we use 2020 data from a representative survey in Sweden containing information about how respondents evaluate the policies. We run regression analyses to estimate the effects on these evaluations and test for socio-economic, knowledge-based and value-based factors. Results show that (1) in Sweden a working time reduction is the most supported eco-social policy; (2) political left orientation increases support for all five eco-social policies; (3) socio-economic factors have effects on wealth tax, maximum income and working time reduction; and (4) knowledge-based factors are more associated with the meat tax. Thus, socio-economic and knowledge-based models have the most significance for policies that could be understood as being either social or environmental, while value-based models have significance across potentially perceived policy divides and hence to a greater extent explain support for policies targeting an ecological ceiling and a social floor.

The role of work and social protection systems in social-ecological transformations: Insights from deliberative citizen forums in Sweden

“…The latter has a clearer eco-social policy goal by linking the provision of cash benefits directly to individuals’ participation in socially and environmentally valuable activities, including for instance education, care, political participation, and engaging in activities that deliver the societal needs that are not met by the market (Dukelow and Murphy, 2022: 511). Moreover, UBI is comparatively unpopular in Sweden (Khan et al, 2022; Lee et al, 2023), while a Participation Income could be combined much more easily with the social-democratic welfare tradition of UBS.…”

Degrowth: a path to transformative solutions for socio-ecological sustainability

“…Meadowcroft in Gough et al, 2008) that all aim to gradually optimize ecological performances within wider ‘green growth’ strategies, degrowth notions of the state presuppose a break with what Hausknost (2020) calls the ‘glass ceiling’ of transformations, namely the policy priority of economic growth. If the growth provision were replaced by a sustainability provision, governments could build governance networks at various scales (European, national, local) and with various private, semi-private, and non-profit actors to ensure the respect of ecological limits in production and consumption patterns (Khan et al, 2023). In such multi-level and multi-scalar frameworks, higher level frameworks will be required to set ecological and social targets and to facilitate the sharing (re-)distribution of resources to reduce regional and social inequalities.…”

Support for eco-social policy from a class perspective: Responsibilities, redistribution, regulation and rights

“…Prior studies on support for eco-social policy mostly involved attitudinal research, and investigated the effects of socio-economic factors such as education and income, as well as individual traits like political orientation and values. Empirical research based on international data has revealed a strong linkage with political ideology: voters of green and left parties and persons who describe themselves as politically rather left-oriented are more in support of eco-social policy; right-oriented persons are more likely to reject such policy (Fritz and Koch, 2019; Khan et al, 2022; Otto and Gugushvili, 2020). Other determinants of support found in these studies are education, gender and work: women and people with higher educational qualifications, as well as people in jobs with an interpersonal work logic tend to be more in favour of eco-social policy.…”

“…There are also attempts to co-create eco-social policies by engaging a broader public, via deliberative citizen forums and participative workshops (Guillen-Royo, 2020;Lindellee et al, 2021). Examples of ecosocial policies discussed in the literature include the Universal Basic Income (Dumont, 2022;Gielens et al, 2022;Van Parijs, 2004), Universal Basic Services (Coote, 2022;Gough, 2019), maximum income (Buch-Hansen and and working time reductions (Khan et al, 2022;Persson et al, 2022). 1 Yet, there has been no real progress on actual political implementation of an eco-social agenda.…”