Towards sustainable wellbeing: What do we know about the potential role of social services?

The climate crisis poses a series of urgent challenges for public policies, and it is increasingly seen as vital to find ways to achieve global ecological sustainability while ensuring human well-being for all. In Europe, the welfare state – with social protection and social services as the two core pillars – plays a pivotal role in these debates. Deliverable 2.3 focuses on social services and their potential role in the green transition. Based on a systematic review, the report maps and synthesises the scattered and fragmented pieces of existing theoretical knowledge and empirical evidence the literature offers. The study discusses what the literature says about three research questions: Which social services are considered useful in a socio-ecological perspective? Which goals or priorities in policy design and principles of award should underpin future eco-social services? How should social services be organised and with what motivations? The report also tries to identify concrete empirical examples of eco-social services from across Europe. The systematic review identified 36 relevant contributions but found no consensus on which services are most useful or relevant for the transition towards ecological sustainability (RQ1). However, there however seems to be near consensus around the policy design and principles of award (RQ2). Services should be universal and focus on covering basic needs. In contrast, little is said about how services should be organised (RQ3). Only two of the reviewed studies analysed ongoing, bottom-up eco-social initiatives related to social services. The report concludes that scholarship on “eco-social” services is emerging but is still in its infancy. Overall, two findings stand out. First, the eco-social policy literature lacks a shared concept of social services and in practice collapses the category into universal basic services. Therefore, the literature would, benefit from a stronger consensus on which services belong to this field of study and from engaging more explicitly with traditional debates in social policy scholarship. Second, the ecological benefits attributed to universal social services are largely assumed rather than empirically tested and, hence, better data and more empirical research would bring the field forward.