1 Sustainable Welfare and EU Climate Change Policies

Theories of welfare and public policies do not normally question GDP, income growth and rising material standards of living as desirable outcomes. By contrast, sustainability research since the Brundtland report has indicated that, due to ecological limits, Western material standards of economic development (and hence of welfare) are not generalisable to the rest of the planet. Climate change further complicates the maintenance of welfare systems as governments are already recalibrating such systems because of the global financial and economic crisis. As response to these challenges, authors such as Fitzpatrick, Gough and Koch have started to integrate theoretically social welfare research on the one hand and ecological sustainability research on the other, into a common concept of ‘sustainable welfare’. This paper discusses tensions and potential synergies between the concept of ‘sustainable welfare ’ and EU climate change policies. The paper first reviews the hitherto debate on sustainable welfare, or what it requires to make welfare sustainable. The second section deals with the design of EU climate policies highlighting tensions and potential synergies relative to the theoretical concept of sustainable welfare