Bailey, D. (2015) The Environmental Paradox of the Welfare State: The Dynamics of Sustainability. New Political Economy, 20 (6). pp. 793-811. ISSN 1356-3467
Abstract
Thus far, there has been a reluctance to instigate a dialogue and engage with the tensions between two literatures with significant insights for each other. The first is the literature on the fiscal sustainability of welfare states, which is invariably predicated upon future growth primarily to manage demographic changes. The second is the post-growth literature, which has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years due to an environmental critique of economic growth. Both literatures contain implications for the analysis of welfare state sustainability. The primary contribution of this paper will be to explore the intractability of the tensions between these discourses and the difficulty of mapping out a progressive policy direction in the twenty-first century which meets both our environmental and social sensibilities. It is claimed that in the post-industrial world the fiscal sustainability of welfare capitalism is dependent upon public expenditure financed indirectly an environmentally unsustainable growth dynamic, but that ironically any conflagration of public welfare programmes is likely to be counter-productive as the welfare state is able to promote de-carbonisation strategies and notions of the public good as well as promoting monetarily and ecologically efficient public welfare services.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2015 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Permission is granted subject to the terms of the License under which the work was published. Please check the License conditions for the work which you wish to reuse. Full and appropriate attribution must be given. This permission does not cover any third party copyrighted material which may appear in the work requested. |
Keywords: | welfare state; post-growth; environmental sustainability; fiscal sustainability; climate change; beyond GDP |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Politics and International Relations (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 24 Jun 2015 09:31 |
Last Modified: | 24 Feb 2016 10:08 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2015.1079169 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/13563467.2015.1079169 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:87436 |