Welfare states and environmental states: a comparative analysis

Abstract

A framework is presented for thinking about state intervention in developed capitalist economies in two domains: social policy and environmental policy (and, within that, climate-change policy). Five drivers of welfare state development are identified, the ‘five Is’ of Industrialisation: Interests, Institutions, Ideas/Ideologies, and International Influences. Research applying this framework to the postwar development of welfare states in the OECD is summarised, distinguishing two periods: up to 1980, and from 1980 to 2008. How far this framework can contribute to understanding the rise and differential patterns of environmental governance and intervention across advanced capitalist states since 1970 is explored, before briefly comparing and contrasting the determinants of welfare states and environmental states, identifying common drivers in both domains and regime-specific drivers in each. The same framework is then applied to developments since 2008 and into the near future, sketching two potential configurations and speculating on the conditions for closer, more integrated ‘eco-welfare states’.

Keywords:

• welfare state
• environmental state
• climate mitigation policy
• social policy
• comparative research

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the support provided by the UK ESRC (grant reference number RES-000-22-3683). For incisive and helpful comments on an earlier draft, I am grateful to Anna Coote, James Meadowcroft, and two anonymous referees, as well as the participants at the ECPR workshop ‘Green Leviathan, Ecological Insurance Agency, or Capitalism’s Agent? Revisiting the Ecological State in the Anthropocene’, Mainz, Germany, March 2013.

Notes

1. In particular, it draws on: the editors’ Introduction, ‘Intellectual roots’ by Pierson and Leimgruber; ‘The emergence of the welfare state’ by Kuhnle and Sander; ‘Post-war welfare state development’ by Nullmeier and Kaufmann; ‘Social expenditure and revenues’ by Obinger and Wagschal; ‘The social rights of citizenship’ by Stephens; ‘Welfare retrenchment’ by Levy; ‘Models of the welfare state’ by Arts and Gelissen; and ‘The global future of welfare states’ by Therborn and myself.

2. Though even in these fields much can be explained by the offshoring of industrial production under the guise of globalisation.

3. The extent that countries are net importers of manufactured goods and thus ‘exporters’ of emissions varies widely: the UK ‘outsources’ one quarter of its emissions, which provides an important leeway in meeting its Kyoto targets, whereas Germany and Japan are roughly in balance. This could contribute to the UK’s ‘leadership’ role in climate mitigation (Gough 2013a).

4. Nation states of course also play important, unequal, and variable roles in shaping the global governance of both climate-change policy and social policy. This whole issue is left aside here, but is discussed and compared in Gough 2013c

5. For some of these ideas, see Victor 2008, Jackson 2009, Gough and Meadowcroft 2011, Gough 2013a, Coote 2013, 2015.