Ecological transitions and the welfare state. A pragmatist-systemic approach in eco-social policy research and design

The paper discusses the contribution of the pragmatist-systemic logic of inquiry in social policy research and design for analyzing and dealing with the combined challenges of welfare and environmental sustainability. Concepts such as sustainable welfare, eco-social policy and just transition arise from the growing awareness that welfare systems are an important driver of a model of development that is proving incompatible with the ecological limits of the planet (Gough 2017; Koch and Mont 2016). The emergence of this problem is linked to a sort of triple dynamic in which increasing social risks and demand for protection occurs alongside the fiscal crisis of welfare states (Pearson 2011) and the urgent need to meet the environmental crises threatening the ecological balances of the planet (Rockström et al. 2009). The resulting triple crisis of sustainability gives rise to so called “super-wicked” problems (Levin et al. 2012) for the policy-making as well as calls for more holistic and integrated visions between social policy and sustainability analysis (Gough 2016). An emerging literature has provided some important insights on this subject. However, the prevailing sector-specific and large-scale research frameworks, the influential anthropocentric visions (Bateson 1972; Eriksen 2016)), the widespread over-simplifying assumptions in policy research and design have created sort of reductionist traps (Byrne 1998; Room 2011). The latter, in particular, makes it difficult to observe and deal with the complexity of the ongoing dynamics (Espinosa and Walker 2011), the inherent trans-contextuality of policy-making (Brans, Pattyn 2017; Clarke et al. 2015; Vanderbroucke 2017) and eco-social processes (Büchs, Koch 2017), the methodological implications of transition processes, and the ways in which organizational, learning and co-evolutionary processes make welfare systems more or less ecologically sustainable or parasitical (Villa 2016, 2020). To take a step forward, the present paper introduces a pragmatist-systemic logic of inquiry in eco-social policy research and design (Villa, forthcoming). This approach is actualized by blending pragmatist observations with complex-system analysis, with a particular regard for the role of abduction as a legitimate part of the investigation processes and a useful analytical and change strategy (Bateson 1972; Burnes 2004; Granovetter 2017; Harries-Jones 1995; Lewin 1951; Peirce 1958; Swedberg 2014). Indeed, abduction reflects the process of forming/selecting analytical and explanatory hypotheses in situations in which the previous ones fail, appear obsolete or are simply lacking, enabling recognizing, reconstructing and comparing patterns of interactions, rules and regularities in complex systems (Villa and Johansen 2019). Research methodology is mainly based on action-research (Adelman 1993; Burns 2007; Lewin 1951) which fits well for this purpose as well as the aim of promoting both research- and action-driven fieldworks acting “from within” and “from below” and based on the collaboration between researchers and social and political actors trespassing sector-specific boundaries. The paper include an introduction to the topic of welfare sustainability, the reasons for a pragmatist-systemic logic of inquiry and the use of action-research in this field, few notes on the outcomes from case-studies and some further reflection on the methodological challenges for the ecological transition.