Towards a Publicly Acceptable Postgrowth Social Policy? Thick, Eudaimonic Need as the Basis for a Sustainable Wellbeing State and Society

It is now widely accepted among sustainability scholars that only a postgrowth future, involving a voluntary, democratically negotiated, equitable downscaling of societies’ physical throughput can succeed in addressing the environmental crisis. A significant challenge for proponents of such a change is the maintenance of human wellbeing in postgrowth Global North societies, where welfare systems are closely tied to economic growth. Policies, like Universal Basic Income (UBI) and Universal Basic Services (UBS) have been proposed using needs-based criteria to operationalize wellbeing but face political resistance due to financing concerns—their requirement for significant redistributive taxation reducing affluent groups’ consumption. This article explores a potential solution to this problem: a broadening of need conceptualizations beyond thin approaches, associated with Doyal and Gough’s work, to systematically incorporate thicker eudaimonic understandings. These highlight more fully non-material needs affecting a broader cross-section of the population. The article focuses on the world of paid and unpaid work to show that such an approach can successfully highlight non-material needs affecting a wide range of the population. However, using illustratively the popular postgrowth social policy option of working time reduction (WTR), it also shows that responding to such needs could generate significant trade-offs with other wellbeing goals and is likely to require a much broader postgrowth social policy agenda, if strongly entrenched growth and consumption norms are to be challenged. This would involve more detailed consideration of the wellbeing role of provisioning system elements other than the traditional welfare state.