Eco-social Policies and the European Parliament: The Future of the Welfare State under the Green Transition

The so-called eco-social policies and the relationship between the EU’s green and social goals have become a salient topic in both political and scholarly debates. The policy debate has revolved around the concept of a ‘just transition’ and has reactively focused on mitigating the negative social impacts of the green transition. Here the emphasis has been on reskilling, in line with the social investment paradigm, with less attention paid to income support and even less to public services. While pointing at these shortcomings, the scholarly debate around the eco-social policies in the EU context has tended to pay less attention to how the welfare state should change in response to the environmental and climate crises. It also discusses the ‘social’ in the eco-social state and eco-social policies in narrow terms and sidelines important questions about care and social reproduction. This paper interrogates the EU’s current and future ecosocial policies from the perspective of ideas about the eco-social state circulating in the EU political space and political conflicts over these ideas. More specifically, the paper analyses debates about the eco-social policies and the ecological/social/economy nexus in the European Parliament (EP), tracing alternatives to the EU’s current approach to combining social and environmental (and economic) goals and the role of the state therein, and identifying different ideational underpinnings of the EP’s political groups. It asks, what is the future of the welfare state in the context of the green transformation in the eyes of the EP political groups, and what kind of party-political struggles emerge in relation to the future and how it is to be achieved? The paper is based on a qualitative, constructivist analysis of broad document data consisting of parliamentary debates, documents related to key files (ie. EGD, JTF, SCF), of the political groups.