Eco-social policies, capitalism and the horizon of emancipatory politics

Within the space of a few years, eco-social policies evolved from being endorsed by a marginal community of heterodox scholars to being established in mainstream circles. While this is a welcome development, it also raises questions among critical social policy scholars. How should an emancipatory eco-social policy look? Rather than specifying concrete policies, this article contributes to answering this question by discussing the relationship between eco-social policies and capitalism. The discourse of ‘sustainable welfare’ tends to problematise growth rather than capitalism, risking a technocratic co-optation by neoliberal elites. Recent attempts to provide empirically applicable ‘non-normative’ definitions of eco-social policies risk weakening the critical potential of sustainable welfare ideas, de-politicising global capitalism with its inherent inequalities and unsustainability. I argue that critical scholars should embrace a democratic, feminist, and anti-racist/anti-colonial eco-socialism as the normative horizon of eco-social policies; discuss challenges related to the realisation of this ideal; and propose an agenda for critical eco-social policy research.