Towards an eco-social PI centred on the ‘capability to take care of the world’

To normatively ground our proposal, we build on the CA and the feminist literature on the ‘ethics of care’. The CA implies focusing public action on the expansion of people’s capabilities, i.e. their real freedom to lead the kind of life they ‘have reason to value’ (Sen, Reference Sen1999: 18; Nussbaum, Reference Nussbaum2011)Footnote ¹ . There are two main reasons for choosing the CA as a normative framework of reference for our proposal.

First, the CA has the potential to re-orient welfare reform beyond narrow concerns of employment-promotion, on the basis of two arguments (Laruffa, Reference Laruffa2020). On the one hand, from a capability perspective, not only employment but also other activities, such as care work and civic engagement, are considered valuable forms of participation that social policy should support. On the other hand, employment is valuable only if it positively contributes to human flourishing. Thus, the link between labour market inclusion and capability-expansion is not automatic and cannot be simply assumed. Combining these two arguments, we contend that work should be reconceptualised in a broad way to include other activities beyond employment and that social policy should be concerned with promoting meaningful work that sustains people’s lives and the environmental and social conditions upon which they depend (cf. Deranty, Reference Deranty2021) rather than any type of work.

At this point, the CA can be usefully combined with the ‘ethics of care’, as developed by feminist theorists (e.g. Gilligan, Reference Gilligan1993; Tronto, Reference Tronto2013). An ethics of care emphasises the social and political value of caring as a human activity and highlights the importance of human connections, interdependence, reciprocity, and the ties between relationship and responsibility. Fisher and Tronto (Reference Fisher, Tronto, Abel and Nelson1990: 40) define care as ‘a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web’. This perspective overcomes the boundaries of public and private spheres, embracing the social totality of relations, including human care relations and our ecological relationship with nature.

Against this background, the issue for social policy is not only that of promoting a work/life balance aimed at reconciling paid employment with other valuable activities. Rather, and more profoundly, we argue that it is possible to re-think the meaning of work – both within and outside the labour market – through the lens of ‘care’. Indeed, the narrative of care promotes a new paradigm, reimagining the meaning of social participation. This fundamentally changes the way in which we see work, whereby the latter can be redefined as the ‘practice of taking care of the world’ and put at the core of a new welfare state architecture (Laruffa, Reference Laruffa2021). In this context, PI may be used as a policy lever for promoting the social and environmental sustainability of our societies. A PI would provide citizens with an ‘exit option’ from the labour market, allowing, encouraging and enabling them to participate in various reproductive and ecological activities and make valuable contributions that society greatly needs, ranging from the care of persons to the reparation of environmental degradation or the reinforcement of the democratic culture. Crucially, however, the ethics of care should also re-orient paid work itself, refocusing employment on the care for people and for the planet. Hence, the PI should not be understood as a substitute for interventions aimed at ‘greening’ employment.

The second reason for choosing the CA as a normative framework of reference lies in the importance it accords to democracy (e.g. Sen, Reference Sen2009). From this perspective, the CA calls for democratising how social policies are designed and implemented. In particular, citizens should participate in defining the nature of the ‘valuable activities’ beyond employment. This ‘democratic’ approach is essential for developing a PI that successfully overcomes its critiques and potential drawbacks. This is in keeping with the anthropological understanding of individuals as multidimensional, comprising receivers, doers and judges of public action (cf Bonvin and Laruffa, Reference Bonvin and Laruffa2021). Capability-enhancing policies should simultaneously conceive targeted individuals as ‘receivers’ of welfare benefits, where the latter are sufficiently generous for respecting their dignity; as ‘doers’, i.e. actors who flourish through valuable activities both within and beyond the labour market; and as ‘judges’, i.e. citizens who are capable and willing to express their aspirations and values and to participate in formulating the policies themselves. Our proposal of an eco-social PI combines these two insights: social policy should promote other valuable reproductive activities beyond employment and the precise content of these policies should be defined democratically.

Conditionality, stigma and the administrative feasibility of PI

Having outlined the normative desirability of an eco-social PI, in this section we focus on the policy challenges associated with putting a PI into practice, including how to specify the forms of ‘participation’ that count for the purposes of maintaining eligibility, and whether PI should be a universal or a means-tested payment. These questions are critical to understanding how different a PI is from either UBI or conventional workfare-oriented social assistance. Even more importantly, they speak to the concern about ‘effective enforcement of a broad participation requirement’ that De Wispelaere and Stirton, (Reference De Wispelaere and Stirton2007: 524) argue would be administratively complex and costly, as well as potentially stigmatising if eligibility is conditioned on invasive bureaucratic assessments that give rise to the ‘demeaning treatment’ (Patrick and Simpson, Reference Patrick and Simpson2020: 476) of claimants. Given the assumptions that ‘far-reaching conditionality regimes’ make about claimants and the forms of treatment they entail, Patrick and Simpson argue that supervisory forms of conditionality may simply be ‘incompatible with dignified and respectful treatment’ (2020: 485). ‘Claims stigma’ (Baumberg, Reference Baumberg2015: 183) can be distinguished from how targeted income supports can also undermine dignity in a distributional sense. This occurs when payments are set so low as to deprive people of the resources to secure a minimum standard of living and participate fully in society. A core paradox of PI proposals is how to reconcile conditionality with a commitment to a welfare system that treats people with dignity and respect?

PI proposals, like all social policy, must deal with potential trade-offs between various goals underlying social security. These include alleviating poverty through affording people a decent standard of living and, in the context of an eco-social welfare state, enabling people to divert their time away from the productivist economy towards the performance of eco-social and reproductive labour. In pursuing these objectives social security measures must also function to preserve people’s dignity and respect. An eco-social PI must address these objectives simultaneously but there may be trade-offs between them. For example, where the objective of alleviating poverty is prioritised, this may point towards selective forms of income support that are narrowly targeted at those living close to or below the poverty line. So, the potential behavioural effects of a PI in diverting people’s time away from productivist activity towards eco-social and reproductive labour would be diminished. Conversely, where the goal of promoting eco-social activity is prioritised as the core objective, this points towards more universal forms of income support with more tightly monitored behavioural conditions to ensure that recipients engage in eco-social labour. Yet widening the reach of any PI may undercut its political feasibility and affordability, raising the question of how such a social security reform could be financed.

Moreover, the more tightly monitored participation requirements are, the greater the risk of ‘relationally stigmatising’ recipients by subjecting them to forms of administrative treatment that undermine their dignity. The key point is that there are tensions between the multiple policy objectives animating the reform of income supports in an eco-social context that need to be carefully navigated and balanced. Moreover, a PI will invariably be only one component of a much broader suite of welfare and tax reforms that are needed to support any eco-social transition. In particular, significant changes in income and/or consumption tax rates may be needed to motivate more affluent social groups to divert their time towards forms of eco-social participation and reproductive labour. Moreover, in recognising and rewarding these forms of participation at a policy level, a PI may also have wider spill over effects in terms of how eco-social and reproductive labour are societally valued so that productivist employment is no longer seen as ‘the main vector of social inclusion’ (Deranty, Reference Deranty2021: 3) or ‘primary’ civic duty (Patrick, Reference Patrick2012).

Whereas some see universal basic income as a catch-all alternative to both means-tested welfare and social insurance, Atkinson carefully positioned PI as complementary to unemployment insurance and state pensions. Social insurance would remain the default social security for many, enhancing the affordability and political feasibility of a PI that would ‘cut dependence on means-tested benefits’ (Atkinson, Reference Atkinson1996: 67). Atkinson’s key objection to means-testing was its application at household level in male-breadwinner systems. This denies women individual entitlement, a prerequisite for autonomy and equality. Income tests also create stigma and barriers to income support and lend themselves to paternalistic narratives of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor.

Ensuring an absence of stigmatising barriers is an important principle. However, both fiscal sustainability and political tactics may require that access to PI is limited by some financial threshold, while also ensuring stigma is at least mitigated by how any such threshold is applied. A PI income threshold, if not universal, can be designed so that it functions to selectively ‘screen out’ the most affluent citizens rather than as means of reserving support for only those suffering poverty and extreme deprivation. One could, for example, base circumstance thresholds on estimated minimum income or living wage standards, rather than close to the relative poverty line, as under conventional means-tested payments.Footnote ² PI entitlements could also be gradually tapered on an individualised basis when a person’s (rather than household’s) income exceeds the relevant threshold. So, while a PI need not be universal, it must be widely available, individual, transparent to access, and set at a level that, in conjunction with access to universal basic services, enables people to meet essential needs.

Beyond the issue of means-testing, critics’ key objection to PI relates to the practicalities of administratively enforcing conduct conditions. If participation is defined ambiguously, monitoring may become ‘practically unworkable’ and PI may become a form of UBI by default. Conversely, if participation is narrowly defined and strictly enforced, a PI will ‘in practice bear a close resemblance to a workfare program’ (De Wispelaere and Stirton, Reference De Wispelaere and Stirton2007: 526). Pérez-Muñoz argues that this ‘rule section problem’ generates two sources of arbitrariness: the danger that the criteria of participation will be defined to the disadvantage of ‘those who depend most on this redistributive programme’ and that the procedure for determining criteria will be ‘non-transparent’ (Pérez-Muñoz, Reference Pérez-Muñoz2016: 181). Below, we explore how a co-productive approach based on co-creating participation options at the local level might ameliorate this challenge.

Towards co-production and co-creation

Activation is conventionally implemented through neoliberal paternalistic frameworks that treat claimants as passive, if not deviant, ‘policy subjects’ who must be ‘resubjectificated’ (Whitworth and Carter, Reference Whitworth and Carter2014: 110) through case management and targeted sanctions. In this disciplinary context, claimants have few opportunities ‘to exercise agency or shape the content of services’ (Lindsay et al., Reference Lindsay, Pearson, Batty, Cullen and Eadson2019: 650). Concepts of co-production and co-creation – often used synonymously with co-production – by contrast emphasise the importance of affirming citizens’ agency in creating public value from the programmes they participate in. Following Verschuere et al. (Reference Verschuere, Brandsen and Pestoff2012), Lindsay et al. define co-production as ‘the mix of activities that both public service agents and citizens contribute to the provision of public services’ (2018: 574), although in more normative terms co-production encompasses an approach whereby outcomes are seen as co-created with citizens’ active participation and where the contributions they make are ‘substantial’ (Loeffler and Timm-Arnold, Reference Loeffler and Timm-Arnold2020: 117). Extending this idea, Osborne et al. (Reference Osborne, Radnor and Strokosch2016: 644) argue that public services should be understood as ‘holistic and dynamic’ eco-systems whereby value is co-created within networks of delivery organisations, service users, their families, and communities. That is, value co-creation depends not just on the interactions between service users and frontline professionals but also on contributions from the wider social systems in which they are embedded.

From a public administration perspective, treating citizens as ‘huge untapped resources’ (Nabatchi et al., Reference Nabatchi, Sancino and Sicilia2017: 770) is often defended pragmatically as enhancing service quality and efficiency, allowing problems to be understood in more nuanced ways ‘than professionals acting alone’ (Fung, Reference Fung2015: 517) and increasing service use by promoting a sense of trust and ownership among users (Fledderus et al., Reference Fledderus, Brandsen and Honingh2014). However, from a capabilities perspective, the most important rationale is that co-production values citizen ‘voice, choice and empowerment’ (Lindsay et al., Reference Lindsay, Pearson, Cullen and Eadson2018: 583), recognising their agency as ‘doers’ and ‘judges’ who actively shape the institutions and policies that impact their lives. Here, co-production normatively mirrors the ‘all-affected’ principle of democratic legitimacy, that the voices of those affected by relationships of power should be heard ‘and have an actual influence on’ (Brandsen, Reference Brandsen, Loeffler and Bovarid2021) the nature of political institutions.

Whether co-production is compatible with the ‘legal compulsion’ (Alford, Reference Alford2016: 686) welfare conditionality entails is much debated (cf. Larsen and Caswell, Reference Larsen and Caswell2020). If participation occurs under the threat of sanctions, any sense that it denotes a form of empowerment seems contradictory. The co-created, capability-oriented PI we propose moves away from enforcing participation through sanctions in favour of an enabling approach that relies on appealing to claimants’ intrinsic motivations through the quality of participation options available. As discussed below, seeds of this approach are already evident in the reforms to Dutch social assistance under the 2015 Participation Act and subsequent ‘trust experiments’ (Muffels et al., Reference Muffels, Gielens, Vos, Muffels and Gielens2019), as well as in recent experiments with co-creating employability services in Scotland (Lindsay et al., Reference Lindsay, Pearson, Cullen and Eadson2018) and Denmark (Larsen and Caswell, Reference Larsen and Caswell2020).

Under the Netherland’s decentralised model, municipal governments – who are responsible for disbursing national social assistance (SA) payments – enjoy autonomy to adjust how national social security policies are implemented. While benefit levels are nationally ‘set in stone’ by indexing payments to minimum wages (Groot et al., Reference Groot, Muffels and Verlaat2019: 282), municipalities retain the power to determine participation requirements. Hence while the Participation Act enshrined stronger participation obligations, each municipality was responsible for determining what these requirements would be and how strictly they would be enforced (Groot et al., Reference Groot, Muffels and Verlaat2019). Many municipalities pursued a workfarist orientation based on strict monitoring and sanctions. However, discouraged by the low success rates of this approach, several experimented with new ways of implementing SA through ‘trust experiments’. While retaining a core commitment to the expectation that all claimants should undertake socially useful activities, these municipalities opted to rely on intrinsic motivations to encourage participation.

Participation was interpreted broadly to encompass a wider range of contributions including education and volunteering. Advisors in welfare offices eschewed close monitoring in favour of trusting citizens not to misuse SA, and offering demand-oriented opportunities on the basis that building trust through the creation of participation opportunities ‘is likely to be more effective in the longer run’ (Muffels et al., Reference Muffels, Gielens, Vos, Muffels and Gielens2019: 115). Accordingly, reintegration/participation plans were designed around claimants’ own beliefs about which forms of participation were important. That is, participation criteria were co-created at the street-level rather than bureaucratically determined, and ‘reciprocity was assumed’ (Muffels, Reference Muffels, Laenen, Meuleman, Otto, Roosma and van Lancker2021: 155) rather than enforced. This did not render Dutch SA a form of UBI because eligibility remained restricted by conditions of ‘circumstance’ (i.e. means-testing) and ‘category’ (without social insurance) (see Clasen and Clegg, Reference Clasen, Clegg, Clasen and Siegel2007).

Related experiments in co-creating participation plans with SA recipients have been pursued in municipalities in Scotland and Denmark. In Scotland, under the ‘Making it Work’ (MiW) program, councils in five local government areas partnered with third-sector organisations to develop employment support services for lone parent families based around principles of co-production. Like the Dutch ‘trust experiments’, the programme was based ‘on a model of voluntary participation’ (Lindsay et al., Reference Lindsay, Pearson, Cullen and Eadson2018: 576): it depended on the quality and range of employability as well as on the training activities made available, rather than the extrinsic threat of sanctions. Participant choice and control over individual action plans were the guiding principles of frontline delivery, while the lead provider organisations were embedded within area-based networks to support information sharing, signposting and greater responsiveness to participants’ needs. Again, there was an underlying belief/trust that citizens would be intrinsically motivated to participate if they considered opportunities meaningful and worthwhile.

In Denmark, following a 2016 budget reform giving municipalities greater freedom to design how activation services were delivered, six municipalities moved towards an implementation model based on co-creation rather than the status-quo of the overall service goal being ‘defined in advance’ as employment (Larsen and Caswell, Reference Larsen and Caswell2020: 16). In contrast to the employment services’ traditional ‘goal steering logic’ focused on measuring activity through frequent meetings and progressions to employment: greater leeway was given to staff and citizens ‘for genuine negotiation of which actions to take’ (Larsen and Caswell, Reference Larsen and Caswell2020: 16), recognising claimants’ own knowledge as being of immense importance to co-creating successful outcomes.

The Dutch ‘trust experiments’, and related co-production initiatives in Scotland and Denmark, illustrate alternative ways of targeting social security that do not rely on strict conditionality and sanctions. In effect, they constitute an enabling rather than demanding approach to ‘activating’ participation, and the existing evaluation literature on these initiatives, while limited, indicates their potential for promoting participation while enhancing wellbeing (Dayson et al., Reference Dayson, Pearson and Sanderson2017; Muffels, Reference Muffels, Laenen, Meuleman, Otto, Roosma and van Lancker2021).Footnote ³

While these examples are encouraging, they also reveal some limitations in realising the proposal developed in this article. One limitation is that, given their employment orientation, they do not go far enough on the ecological side. An eco-social policy orientation would, however, affirm a broader reconceptualisation of participation that recognises the value of re-productive and ecological labour and provides opportunities for people to engage in activities that help to sustain people, the environment and the democratic polis rather than reducing reciprocity to only participating in employment, work experience or training. A fuller eco-social direction is found in Swaton’s (Reference Swaton2018) Ecological Transition Income proposal, which envisages a ‘paradigm of co-construction and active partnership’ between groups of engaged citizens, local governments, and non-government organisations in drawing up lists of activities required in the community that recipients could choose to undertake. Likewise, Stamm et al. (Reference Stamm, Matthies, Hirvilammi and Närhi2020) highlight how potential for volunteering/participating in ‘eco-social initiatives’ – small-scale cooperative initiatives, that integrate social and environmental goals – can be actively enabled by income supports and social inclusion policies. Developing this point, Dukelow (Reference Dukelow2021) offers the example of Ireland’s community employment programme, which enables income support recipients to undertake work embedded in community organisations and focussed on social rather than economic contributions.

A second difficulty concerns the transferability of this co-productive model to less ideal cultural-institutional contexts. Success depends on the degree to which this approach is embedded in background local network governance arrangements involving partnerships between public providers, community-based organisations, and other local stakeholders in co-planning a range of community development projects, work experience options, training opportunities and other activities for claimants to engage in. The above examples share common institutional features which enable intersections between co-production at the street-level and local collaborative partnerships. An important enabling condition in Denmark was the strength of municipalities’ inter-organisational collaborations, and relationships with other service providers, through which they could make a wider range of opportunities available. The Netherland’s Participation Act made each municipality responsible for determining what these requirements would be and how strictly they would be enforced (Groot et al., Reference Groot, Muffels and Verlaat2019: 281). Scotland’s experiments in co-producing employability services likewise exhibited similar characteristics of strong inter-organisational collaboration and network governance arrangements as preconditions for co-production at the street-level. Moreover, as in Denmark and the Netherlands, where corporatism and strong partnerships between government and the public-sector have been features of their devolved approaches, Local Authority-led partnerships and ‘a strong culture of partnership-working’ (Lindsay et al., Reference Lindsay, Pearson, Batty, Cullen and Eadson2019: 650) are core to the Scottish model.

We find this proposed model of implementing PI through enabling co-production may thrive in certain institutional contexts. Although activating claimants has been a feature of social policies in each of Denmark, the Netherlands, and Scotland, none are vanguard workfare regimes. In Denmark, while activation policy has been influenced by developments in liberal workfare-oriented regimes, activation reforms have remained embedded in a universalist, social-democratic model (albeit one with strong corporatist elements) that sees labour market reintegration as a supplement rather than substitute for generous welfare benefits. Under what Torfing characterises as an ‘offensive’ workfarist orientation, progression through education and an emphasis on involving claimants in planning counselling and training activities that might empower them to improve their quality of life have historically been preferred to payment cuts and sanctions (Torfing, Reference Torfing1999; Damgaard and Torfing, Reference Damgaard and Torfing2010). Likewise, compared with the rest of the UK, Scotland has inclined towards a rights-based approach to welfare, enshrining a commitment to respect the dignity of individuals at the heart of its social security system (Patrick and Simpson, Reference Patrick and Simpson2020). Compulsion through the threat of sanctions has been removed from devolved activation programmes as a step in this direction.