Indonesia has long been the country of origin for millions of migrant workers. Indonesian men and women have left their homes in search of work to provide a better life for themselves and their families. Most migrant workers are in semi-skilled or unskilled positions in fields such as agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and domestic work, which are mostly low-wage and difficult jobs. There are large numbers of Indonesians in Asia, such as in Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and in wealthy countries in the Persian Gulf, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Migrant workers leave Indonesia both through official, legal channels, as well as through illegal, unofficial channels. These workers are often referred to as “irregular” migrants. Migrants are often treated poorly and are found in dangerous, undesirable jobs. The Indonesian government is increasingly compelled to try and address abuses of their citizens. The Indonesian government is highly attuned to the treatment of its citizens abroad and has embarked on many measures to try and improve their safety overseas. Ultimately, the government has seen some successes at protecting compatriots, but continues to face significant challenges in doing so for a larger number of their workers overseas.

This appendix offers readers who are unfamiliar with Ireland a brief introduction to the 100-year-old Irish state and its institutional features. Understanding Ireland's distinct social ecology and how it impacts on the functioning of politics, administration and economy is important to make sense of the case study sections at the end of each chapter. Apart from its openness and peripherality, three features of the Irish state merit particular attention from the perspective of transformation: the small size of the state (approximately 5.1 million in 2022); its highly centralised distribution of power; and the scale and speed of recent change.

Institutions

Irish public and policy institutions have evolved in a relatively consensusoriented democracy characterised by a centralised multi-party system with a two-chamber parliament and a prime minister (Taoiseach) with a moderate amount of influence. The institutional and policy context is characterised by the paradox of a strongly centralised state and weak local government, alongside a political culture dominated by strong localism that is reinforced by a proportional national electoral system organised around 41 constituencies. A growth in agencies is fracturing central power and creating new veto points which pose challenges for climate and social policy implementation (Torney, 2020). While local county loyalty is strong, sub-national or ‘county’-level power in Ireland is weak, with low density populations and one-off housing creating consequences for institutional capacity, planning and governance (Dekker, 2020). The local autonomy index (Ladner et al, 2015) ranks Ireland as one of the weakest countries in Europe with respect to local autonomy, with strong limiting consequences for the potential role of local government in local procurement and regional planning. In comparative terms, Ireland is grouped with countries with unitary governance and weak local autonomy including Portugal, Romania and Slovenia.

The relatively unique electoral system – proportional representation through a single transferable vote (PR-STV) – reinforces a pre-existing political culture of brokerage and clientelism and fosters localism and a strong sense of local community and loyalty which was a strong asset in the context of pandemic responses and is potentially an anchor for societal responses to climate change.

While this is largely a book about how welfare and social policy needs to change, the starting point is defining the problem: how the political economy of 21st-century capitalism impacts so negatively on both environmental sustainability and societal inequality. Inspired by Polanyi (1944), a fruitful way of understanding social policy is as a reaction and a decommodifying response to capitalism and its unrelenting commodification of labour, land and money (Gough et al, 2008, p 327; Kirby, 2021). A call for decommodification underpins the analysis throughout this book.

Contemporary political economy models and the related worlds of welfare capitalism are deficient, failing to secure gender and other equalities, socioeconomic justice, health and wellbeing, social reproduction, democratic participation as well as sustainable ecologies. The case for transformation is altogether stronger from these multiple perspectives and demands a comprehensive political response. The case for an ecosocial solution is manifold, and true from the obvious perspective of climate change, as well as the wider perspective of system change.

The analysis rejects green-growth solutions that are overly productivist or techno-optimist in nature. This is consistent with a post-growth transformation to an ecosocial model that demotes economic growth as a policy objective, instead maximising human wellbeing, meeting basic needs and protecting our common eco-system. Each chapter concludes by exploring the chapter topic in the anchoring case study of Ireland.

Transition of a sufficient scale towards an ecologically oriented social model demands a fundamental overhaul of existing welfare trajectories. This means shifting focus away from institutions and policies that ‘commodify’ labour and prioritise productivity growth and employment as the primary mechanism to social citizenship. This necessitates practical changes in supporting institutions (discussed in Chapter 4) and UBS (discussed in Chapter 5) but also to income supports, the focus of this chapter. Decommodification requires that policy and practice promote greater varieties of participation beyond the labour market and reciprocal interdependent care relationships throughout our life cycles.

The income support system needs to complement principles of an enabling and facilitating welfare system that primarily works through UBS to meet collective needs. The first section of this chapter explores a spectrum of income support options including Universal Basic Income (UBI), Minimum Income Guarantees (MIG) and Participation Income (PI). The mid-section of the chapter offers PI as an example of a state income support system that de-emphasises production, consumption and employment, and enables and values other forms of work, recovering time for activities that have social and ecological value such as providing care, democratic participation and sustaining the environment. The Irish case study offers a blueprint for income support reform towards a PI, in the form of the Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP) and a 2022 artist basic income pilot.

An income support to complement UBS

Options for income support

So far, this book has argued that a just transition demands a fundamental overhaul of existing welfare trajectories. However, the role of social policy in enabling sustainable transition remains marginal within the literature on decarbonisation (Bohnenberger, 2020). Recent literature argues that transitioning towards an ‘ecosocial’ welfare model requires re-anchoring welfare institutions in a ‘post-productivist’ architecture wherein income supports and public services are targeted at meeting essential needs rather than catalysing labour productivity and economic growth (Hirvilammi and Koch, 2020). While there is a growing consensus about the need for such an ecosocial policy agenda, there is far less agreement about what specific social policies might contribute to this reorientation.

The contemporary global model of financialised capital not only leads to environmental destruction, loss of biodiversity and global warming but also, without doubt, leads to greater inequality (Piketty, 2014). The first part of this chapter focuses on inequality, itself unequally experienced across different groups in society and between nations. It explores how inequality intersects with the ecological crisis, increasing wants and fuelling consumption in the Global North, while leaving countries and people in the Global South vulnerable to poverty and ill-equipped to meet the challenges that climate change is already presenting. This is particularly true for women and girls who bear the worst impacts of both inequality and climate change. The second part of the chapter discusses tensions at the heart of welfare policy in the Global North. A less conditional and more enabling and flourishing form of careful social policy is needed to resource the scale of active citizenship required in an ecosocial state. The challenge is to redistribute and support work, income, time and democratic participation in a post-growth society and economy. The chapter concludes by reviewing the state of inequality and wellbeing in Irish society.

Social inequality

Inequality

The Oxfam Inequality Report is launched annually to coincide with the opening of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, an annual gathering of the rich and influential. The contrast works. The Inequality Reports have become an important annual statement. Sobering statistics and memorable frames and images are used to illustrate the degree to which wealth is increasingly concentrated. The 2022 report highlighted how a new billionaire emerged every 30 hours during the COVID-19 pandemic, the same time it took nearly a million to fall into extreme poverty. There were 573 more billionaires in the world by March 2022 than in 2020, while a million people every 33 hours were pushed into extreme levels of poverty, 263 million people in 2022, because of the pandemic, growing global inequality and rising food and energy prices that have been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. These Oxfam reports work as an excellent example of framing, discussed in Chapter 8.

There is an interdependence between people's agency ‘to do and be’ and the societal, culture and structural institutions that mediate their lives (see Chapter 7). An anthropological view of humanity illuminates how survival and flourishing are generated through three functions: distribution/production (the market economy); redistribution (the state); and reciprocity (society, community, kin). A reimagined welfare system needs to address these three roles. While market production and purchase are the primary vehicle of survival in capitalism, reciprocity and redistribution remain embedded features of contemporary societies and imaginative reform can draw on mechanisms to integrate welfare into the tissue of social interdependence.

‘We cannot save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed’ (Thunberg, 2019). Institutions are ‘the formal and informal rules, norms, precedents, and organisational factors that structure behaviour’ (Pomey et al, 2010). As humanly-devised constraints and enablers, they structure our political, economic and social interactions (Folbre, 2021, p 23). They influence our opportunities to be and do what we value, while also enabling and constraining our agency, and unequally impacting on different social groups often exacerbating social divisiveness. A new ecosocial paradigm needs to resituate freedom and liberty and generate substantive equality through collective reciprocity and mutual aid. New institutions need capacity to promote new norms, or revive old ones, that can counter behaviours and beliefs that maintain myths of individualism, competition, consumption and selfishness (Folbre, 2021; Jackson, 2021).

This chapter establishes the need for a balanced ecosocial settlement (Button and Coote, 2021). The first part focuses on how institutions might creatively balance reciprocity, freedom and our collective interdependence. The second part discusses how particularly local institutions need to reimagine work and care, enable or facilitate autonomy, and work collaboratively through a culture of co-production, collaboration and participation. This rebalancing requires a rethinking of activation policy as a tool for just transition. Enabling institutions are needed to facilitate socially useful and environmentally sustainable work, enabling social inclusion policy and employment in the care and social economies (Dukelow, 2022). This theme is explored in the Irish case study in the third section of this chapter.

Part I of this book argued that the contemporary capitalist political economy's destructive impacts on both environmental sustainability and society underpins the urgent and compelling need for transformation. The case for an ecosocial state is manifold, from the obvious perspective of climate change, but also from the wider perspective of systemic change. Our political economy models and our related worlds of welfare capitalism are deficient, failing to secure gender and other equalities, socio-economic justice, health and wellbeing, social reproduction, democratic participation as well as sustainable ecologies. The case for change is altogether stronger from these multiple perspectives and demands a comprehensive politics of transformation embracing recognition, redistribution, representation and sustainability (Fraser, 2013).

Part II attempts to apply the theory to practice and link welfare reform with the urgent need to decarbonise the economy and pursue other environmental goals including biodiversity. While a variety of policies are needed, as illustrated in the ‘Policy ingredients for a post-growth ecosocial world’ box in Chapter 3, the focus here is on three core options:

• • An enabling institutional infrastructure to enhance the eco-system of people's lives and limit our collective dependance on the market to deliver core services and supports.

• • A foundational economy as a network of provisioning systems for satisfying basic and essential needs and a way of meeting our collective needs through a system of Universal Basic Services.

• • A Minimum Income Guarantee, a form of Participation Income, to enable participation in socially useful activity and life choices consistent with a post-growth world that values and supports care, reciprocity, mutual interdependence and democracy.

This book began by reflecting on Naomi Klein's candid admission that she came late to climate change politics. Rebecca Solnit has also reflected on how she realised it was time to shift her priorities and make her ‘mild engagement with climate something larger and fiercer’, and challenges us to find our place in engagement with climate change, ‘not just changing what you do, it means being part of the demand for systemic change’ (Solnit, 2016, pp 135– 6). This book echoes that challenge, identifying a clear problem and proposing an ecosocial solution as part of a broader transformative agenda to a post-growth world. It also sketched a political strategy for making it happen. In this conclusion these propositions are interrogated to test whether they are coherent and convincing arguments.

Restating the urgent problems and solutions

Problem

The UK legal contestation of a third runway at London's Heathrow airport and the December 2022 UK decision to open a new coalmine in Whitehaven, Cumbria that will produce annually 400,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, throws into sharp light the inherent conflict between growth driven by ever-increasing consumption and profit, and the climate emergency which threatens our very existence. Both highlighted the link between high levels of inequality, needless consumption, excessive travel, use of fossil fuels and carbon emissions. We can no longer think about climate crisis, economic inequality and never-ending consumerism in isolation. Tackling them requires action now to develop new ecosocial policies to enable us to reduce consumption by collectively meeting our needs. This means moving ultimately to a post-growth economy and society. Recent COPs and IPCC reports shine a nuanced light on inequality and climate injustice but make clear that the rich are the major contributors to worsening climate change, mainly in the Global North, but with rapidly rising numbers in the Global South (Sweeney, 2020). Developed countries, as perpetrators of such inequality and suffering, need to step up and bear their disproportionate responsibility.

Chapters 1 to 3 made the link between ecological destruction and social inequality as two sides of the same coin. Inequality of income, resources, power and wealth are unequally experienced across different groups in society.