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.