This article explores the role of the state in helping households to save. Using the UK as an example of challenges faced in other developed countries, it develops a framework for comparing saving schemes along two dimensions: apparent normative motivation for the scheme and likely impact on savers of varying income levels. Using this framework, our analysis suggests that there is much greater state support for high-income savers than low-income savers, even after the recent introduction of the ‘Help to Save’ scheme. So, while this scheme has provided some support for this group, we propose ways to expand it through providing initial seed funding to each account and greater marketing and accessibility. We note, however, that an important way to help those on low incomes to save is to increase their incomes so they have more capacity to do so.

Over the last few years, there has been an increase in discussions advocating in-cash programmes as a way to alleviate poverty. Indeed, this represents a leap forward in comparison to in-kind programmes. However, little progress, at least in developing countries, has been achieved in answering the question of how the state should transfer the means of redressing deprivation to those who are living in poverty. This article addresses this issue by challenging anti-poverty programmes through a social-egalitarian framework. My main argument starts from the perspective that in-cash transfers are a necessary but not sufficient mechanism for poverty alleviation. I acknowledge that cash alone does not guarantee the poor an equally active role in influencing the public-policy decisions that affect their lives. I then suggest a participatory device to complement the cash-transfer proposal in order to give institutional opportunities to the poor to decide, together with practitioners, what should be done at the level of local public services.

Welfare conditionality, whereby eligibility for income support payments is linked to prescribed forms of behaviour or values, is intended to encourage responsible behaviour in marginalised populations. However in practice, it may have consequences that worsen rather than improve their life chances. One of the most invasive forms of conditional welfare is income management (IM), involving the quarantining of up to 90 per cent of income that cannot be spent on excluded items in order to reduce substance abuse and gambling and enhance financial management and parenting capacity. This qualitative study examines the views of IM participants and community stakeholders in the regional community of Ceduna, Australia. Its findings are presented – pertaining to practical experiences of IM, the impact of IM on participant wellbeing, and community divisions around IM – and the study discusses whether or not it has advanced key program objectives. It is concluded that the negative effects of IM exceed any perceived benefits.

There is an increasing emphasis on activating workers on sick leave and on using their residual work capacity. This article compares activation via graded-work schemes in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, with a focus on the role of employers. The analysis of literature sources and survey data reveals an ongoing reform activity, as well as great diversity in terms of employer obligations and incentives in the countries studied. These differences are very consequential for the intensity of employer efforts to activate sick-listed workers, even when comparing countries that otherwise share many institutional features. The distinction between public and privatised systems of sickness insurance, on the contrary, seems to be less relevant for the question of employer participation in activation. The findings are consistent with the expectation that less comprehensive employer participation is correlated with stronger selectivity in activation efforts. Depending on the prevailing approach in the individual countries and on developments to date, policy-makers are confronted with different challenges and priorities.

Development of effective policy responding to recent increases in rough sleeping in England requires an understanding of the needs of people experiencing homelessness. Research on multiple exclusion homelessness (MEH) should be central to policy development as it highlights the interactions between ‘homelessness’ and ‘deep social exclusion’. This article focuses on the nexus between mental health and homelessness within MEH. Mixed methods findings from Nottingham, England, are used to investigate the role of mental ill-health in the pathways into MEH. This included a survey of the mental health needs of homeless people and ‘homeless pathway’ interviews. Survey results demonstrated high levels of diagnosed and self-reported mental health issues. Interviews highlighted that mental ill-health and homelessness were closely associated with adverse life experiences and could not be viewed in isolation from them. The article contributes further insight on the specificities of mental health issues, their temporal ordering, and interrelationship with homelessness experiences.

While specialist women’s refuges have been central to responses to family violence since the 1970s, their work is under-researched. Little is known outside the family violence sector about the support they provide and how it assists women and children. There have been some critiques of their work but there is limited knowledge of the constraints women’s refuges face. Based on interviews and focus groups with 100 professional stakeholders and twenty-two service users, this article analyses the work of women’s refuges in the Australian state of Victoria in an effort to inform policy reform. The research found that refuges’ underpinning gendered analysis, focus on safety and support and advocacy to ensure women’s human rights are met have much to offer further developments in responding to family violence. In doing so, the article contributes to critical debates about the operation of refuges and the need for specialist family violence services.

Growth-dependent welfare states contribute to climate emergency. The ecological economics, degrowth, and sustainable welfare literatures demonstrate that to re-embed Western production and consumption patterns in environmental limits, an encompassing social-ecological transformation would need to be initiated very soon. This article focuses on the potential roles of the welfare state and social policy in this transformation, applying the concepts of ‘sustainable welfare’ and ‘safe-operating space’. Based on two Swedish studies, it also provides an empirical analysis of the popularity of selected eco-social policies designed to steer the economy and society towards this space: maximum and basic incomes, taxes on wealth and meat, as well as working time reductions. In analogy to the historical role of the state in reconstituting the welfare-work nexus in the post-WWII era and its present engagement in the context of the Covid-19 crisis, it is argued that a more interventionist state is required to grapple with climate emergency.

More nation states are now committing to zero net carbon by 2050 at the latest, which is encouraging, but none have faced up to the transformation of economies, societies and lives that this will entail. This article considers two scenarios for a fair transition to net zero, concentrating only on climate change, and discusses the implications for contemporary ‘welfare states’. The first is the Green New Deal framework coupled with a ‘social guarantee’. I argue that expanded public provision of essential goods and services would be a necessary component of this strategy. The second scenario goes further to counteract runaway private consumption by building a sufficiency economy with ceilings to income, wealth and consumption. This would require a further extension of state capacities and welfare state interventions. The article provides a framework for comparing and developing these two very different approaches.

The idea of pooling resources and sharing risks to provide universal services according to need not ability to pay was at the heart of the post-war settlement. However, decades of market ideology and deep spending cuts have left most services starved of power and resources. Universal Basic Services (UBS) offers a principled framework for policy and practice that aims to ensure everyone has access to life’s essentials. Based on need theory it combines universality with sufficiency to provide a secure social foundation for all within planetary boundaries. Needs are met in different ways, combining collective and individual measures, as illustrated by examples of childcare, housing and food. UBS can be combined with an income guarantee to ensure no-one’s income falls below an agreed level of sufficiency. Cash and services, which represent a ‘social wage’, are best understood as two sides of the same coin, supporting rather than competing with one another.

In this article we explore the potential of the capability approach as a normative basis for eco-social policies. While the capability approach is often interpreted as a productivist or maximalist perspective, assuming the desirability of economic growth, we suggest another understanding, which explicitly problematises the suitability of economic growth and productive employment as means for enhancing capabilities. We argue that the capability approach allows rejecting the identification of social progress with economic growth and that it calls for democratically debating the meaning of wellbeing and quality of life. We analyse the implications of this conceptualisation for the design of welfare states.

This article aims to bring labour market activation policy into the orbit of eco-social policy, which we can understand as sustainable welfare without growth. Activation is extensively addressed from economic and social policy perspectives; however, environmental sustainability concerns are absent. Typically, each domain, activation and sustainability, is seen as mutually exclusive. Growing debate about sustainable welfare without growth features much discussion about the effects of productivism and about re-orienting and re-valuing work and how we use our time; however, such discussion tends to leave activation and unemployment untouched. One could ask whether there is any role for activation in eco-social policy: why focus on employment and employability, or even push people into work, if postgrowth requires a downsizing of paid employment and working time in everyone’s lives? The purpose of this article is to explore this question and to consider how activation could be re-valued and re-thought as a policy tool for eco-social policy.

We revise Atkinson’s concept of a ‘participation income’ (PI), repositioning it as a form of green conditional basic income that is anchored in a capabilities-oriented eco-social policy framework. This framework combines the capability approach with an ‘ethics of care’ to re-shape the focus of social policy on individuals’ capability to ‘take care of the world’, thus shifting the emphasis from economic production to social reproduction and environmental reparation. In developing this proposal, we seek to address key questions about the feasibility of implementing PI schemes: including their administrative complexity and the criticism that a PI constitutes either an arbitrary and confusing, or invasive and stigmatising, form of basic income. To address these concerns, we argue for an enabling approach to incentivising participation whereby participation pathways are co-created with citizens on the basis of opportunities they recognise as meaningful rather than enforced through strict monitoring and sanctions.