Towards a New Generation of Social Policy: Commonalities between Sustainable Welfare and the IPCC

The climate crisis calls for a new generation of social policy compatible with planetary limits and economic postgrowth circumstances. This article analyses how some of the pillars of such a new generation of social policy may be conceptualized by highlighting commonalities between the most recent IPCC report and the sustainable welfare literature. Methodologically triangulating content analysis of the IPCC report, literature review and qualitative data analysis from citizen forums, we argue that this convergence is particularly evident in four areas central to policymaking: the importance of human needs in eco-social policymaking; the identification of governance structures suitable for a social-ecological transformation; the requirement to co-develop policies via a deliberative, «bottom-up» element; and the need to decouple welfare provision from economic growth.