Limits to welfare? The translation of boundary concepts in global eco-social policy

Due to their growth dependency, developed welfare states frequently exceed planetary boundaries and transgress sustainable consumption and production corridors that scholars deem crucial for mitigating climate change. Recognizing that international organizations (IOs) often act as policy entrepreneurs and innovators of new ideas, the article asks whether and how concepts of limits to welfare, which are crucial in recent academic debates on social policy in times of ecological crises, are translated and discussed by IOs. Empirically, it focuses on three key IOs: the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank. The article maps how IOs frame limits in global eco-social policy and use them strategically. It finds that limits have important implications for social policy: socially, they shift responsibilities to private actors; temporally, they allow a focus on innovation and future change; spatially, they expand policy opportunities into the periphery. These implications are also translated into specific policy proposals: promoting self-limitations rather than regulation, fostering technological and economic change, and exporting economic and social policy models from the Global North worldwide. These results give rise to doubts whether IOs sufficiently acknowledge ecological limits that could orient a transformative agenda of sustainable welfare.