Meeting Needs within Limits
From Welfare States to Eco-Social Policy
Blog Publications
Decarbonising housing fairly: a sufficiency approach
April 25, 2024
Housing is a huge source of carbon emissions. But decarbonising it effectively requires a sufficiency lens.
Residential housing accounts for about 19 per cent of greenhouse-gas emissions in the European Union and the United Kingdom. Both are committed to a rapid reduction in direct and indirect emissions from housing: the EU to a 90 per cent reduction from 1990 levels by 2040, the UK to 78 per cent by 2035. So the decarbonisation of housing is a major policy priority.
Full article available: here.
Solving the housing crisis without building new houses
April 17, 2024
There is a cross-party consensus that the way to tackle the housing crisis is to build more homes. But this approach isn’t working, and does little to address inequality and the environmental impacts of construction. Instead, governments should be pursuing innovative policies that make efficient use of the existing housing stock, of which there is plenty, argue Charlotte Rogers and Ian Gough.
Full article available: here.
Inadequate Housing – A Radical Sufficiency Approach
March 8, 2024
How should we respond when life’s fundamental necessities become increasingly ecologically destructive? How do we define necessities in contrast to luxuries, and understand the trade-off between human and environmental well-being? These are the questions we begin to address in our forthcoming paper, concentrating on the unique consumption good of housing, conceptualised as a universal human need. Using a sufficiency approach, we demarcate a ‘housing corridor’ for the UK, identifying a sufficiency space between necessities and luxuries. This is the space we must collectively aim to occupy. Our strategy is informed not only by biophysical limits, but also by mutually enforcing ethico-social limits, manifest in vast levels of inequality.
Full article available: here.
Public services are more sustainable: the NHS example
November 03, 2021
A major argument for collective provision of several basic services is that it is more sustainable than dispersed private production and purchase. Public and other collective bodies have the potential to pursue low carbon and other ecologically sustainable practices. We have known this for some time in the health service field.
On October 1st 2020 the NHS became the world’s first health system to commit to delivering a ‘net zero health service’ by 2040 or 2045 (depending on the degree of control the NHS can exert on emissions).
Full article available: here.
Reviewing the NHS’s net-zero strategy
October 15, 2020
The UK’s National Health Service recently announced an ambitious plan to become net-zero by 2045, the first health system in the world to make such a commitment. Ian Gough reviews the report which sets out how the NHS plans to deliver on this significant goal.
Full article available: here.
Move the debate from Universal Basic Income to Universal Basic Services: UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab
January 19, 2021
Many arguments have been made for Universal Basic Income (UBI). This article summarizes an alternative case: for Universal Basic Services (UBS). The issue of their relationship is not directly considered here, but the argument is made that UBS is more egalitarian and sustainable than UBI, as befits the rethinking of eco-social policy in the face of dangerous climate change. Furthermore, it is argued that UBS is also politically more incremental and reformist than the case for a true UBI.
Full article available: here.
From efficiency to sufficiency – the path to a just transformation
January 2021
Image with acknowledgments to Coterra Impact
https://coterraimpact.com/the-ecological-crisis-and-the-failure-of-our-elders/
PRIME has played an important role in developing the idea of a Green New Deal, the radical strategy to combine decarbonisation and other practices to ensure the integrity of the natural environment alongside the advancement of human wellbeing and greater equality. I want to argue here that while this is essential, it cannot be enough. We must move from efficiency to sufficiency, for reasons of both ecological sustainability and social justice.
This means embracing demand-side climate policies alongside the full spectrum of technological supply-side programmes.
Full article available: here.
Climate breakdown and valuing what matters: a key lesson from Covid-19
December 2020
The Covid crisis is questioning many of the hidden assumptions of contemporary capitalist economies. One of these is the nature of economic value – what activities have value, are essential or critical to survival, prosperity, and justice in some way, and what are wasteful or destructive.
This was brought home to me by a mundane list published by the UK government on March 19th, 2020: Guidance for schools, childcare providers, colleges and local authorities in England on maintaining educational provision. It listed those groups of essential workers whose children would be entitled to continuing educational provision after the shutdown of schools, preschools and colleges. In so doing it set out the sectors of the economy ‘critical to the COVID-19 response’. The sectors extend way beyond health and care or emergency services. They include farmers, supermarket staff, workers in water, electricity, gas and oil, teachers, telecommunication workers, transport staff, workers in law and justice, religious staff, social security staff and retail banking staff. A similar, but wider, list was published by the govern-ment in Ireland.
Identifying essential workers in this way has been anathema to conventional neo-classical economic theory, where any activity is deemed valuable or productive if it is remunerated, whatever its social value or disvalue. A carer equates with a hedge fund manager. So the coronavirus has achieved in a few weeks a shift in perspective unequalled in eight dec-ades. It has begun to question the nature of economic value. Yet a much, much greater crisis is now walk-ing towards us – that of climate and ecological breakdown. What are the lessons we can learn from the above?
UBI: A False Promise
November 2020
Universal basic income is a policy rather than a fundamental value or goal of collective action, unlike freedom, equality, well-being, or sustainability. It is one very specific route to such values or goals and should be evaluated accordingly. With that in mind, I want to question the coherence of UBI as a policy strategy and to question the values which it purports to pursue.
Full article available here.
Reviewing the NHS’s net-zero strategy
October 15, 2020
The UK’s National Health Service recently announced an ambitious plan to become net-zero by 2045, the first health system in the world to make such a commitment. Ian Gough reviews the report which sets out how the NHS plans to deliver on this significant goal.
Full article available here.
Great Transition Network, Discussion on UBI
October 2020
In my view, Paul Raskin gets this web discussion off on the wrong foot, when he writes: ‘Guy [Standing's] philosophical and political arguments set the right tone by mercifully staying clear of the knotty details of how a UBI might be designed’. But UBI is precisely a policy rather than a fundamental value or goal of collective action, unlike freedom, equality, wellbeing, sustainability, or whatever. It is one specific route to a value goal or goals and should be evaluated as such. I want to question the coherence of UBI as a policy strategy and to question the values which it purports to pursue.
To my knowledge, no one, anywhere in the world, is seriously proposing a full UBI. For instance, the Citizen's Income Trust has ruled out the possibility of a Full Citizen’s Income for everyone as far too expensive. So all extant pilots, experiments and plans in the rich, developed world are for what might be called a minimal BI. This is the case for the UK Royal Society for the Arts scheme, Andy Stern’s US plan, and Philippe Van Parijs’s Euro-dividend of €200 a month.
Full article available: here.
Universal Basic Services: Letters to the London Review of Books
February 2019
Let us accept the need, acknowledged by John Lanchester, for a new economy that will reverse the frightening momentum of neoliberalism and avert climate catastrophe, tax global corporations and the rich, even cut military spending (LRB, 18 July). How is Universal Basic Income any kind of solution to these problems? There are many different versions, as Lanchester says. But there is a core idea: UBI is a programme giving every citizen or resident a regular income for life, with no strings attached, which is enough to live on and provides ‘security’. It is not about handing out cash to rough sleepers. It is not Brazil’s Bolsa Familia programme. It isn’t even Alaska’s Permanent Fund, since $1400 a year is not enough to starve on, let alone enjoy security. Nor is it any of the various plans, from the UK Royal Society for the Arts scheme or Andy Stern’s US plan or Philippe Van Parijs’s start-low-and-see-how-it goes €200 idea.
All extant pilots, experiments and plans are partial. They give money to selected groups of people or they give a little bit of money to everyone and then usually payments cease after a limited period. Insofar as there is evidence that any of these schemes ‘work’, it is only on their own, limited terms. So what is all the fuss about?
Full article available here: link.
Universal Basic Services: A Theoretical and Moral Framework
16 January 2019
The case for Universal Basic Services (UBS) is a recent idea that is attracting much attention. This article provides a theoretical justification for extending the delivery of public services, as an alternative to the longer‐standing argument for Universal Basic Income (UBI). It rests on human need theory and the concept of provisioning systems. Both recognise the irreducible heterogeneity of consumption, the multi‐faceted nature of human needs and the variety of systems on which we all depend. Both recognise the importance of shared systems and mutual benefits. The final part restates the case for social rights or entitlements to the satisfaction of basic needs and for collective responsibilities to meet them to serve the values of equality, efficiency, solidarity and sustainability.
Full article available here: link.