about creating more jobs, more production and more consumption. If the environmental part of sustainable development looks rather bleak, its social component is at least starting to look rosier.
In Chapter 6, Tony Fitzpatrick presents an ‘ecosocial’ agenda for social reform, with the focus on reform options for a post-productive future. Here Fitzpatrick claims the synergies between social and environmental policies have barely registered to date. We find the familiar oppositions between those who favour remaining close to existing socioeconomic models, that is pro-productivism (based on GDP growth, production and consumption, and so on) and those for whom environmentalism and the ecosocial implies a greater, transformative potential. While the diminishing public sphere is again a major cause for concern here (as we heard in Chapter 4), Fitzpatrick does offer some hope, by encouraging us to think less in terms of oppositions between pro-productivists and post-productivists, and more in terms of commonalities and overlaps. For example, if the policy logic is to create more jobs globally to tackle poverty and inequality (the pro-productive position) then this should be accompanied by reduced working times overall (the post-productivist position). The struggle for sustainability is clearly evident but only by seeking alliances and common ground, as Fitzpatrick suggests, may we begin to take some of the necessary steps to resolve the social and ecological problems and challenges now facing humanity.
Population dynamics have long been inextricably linked to ideas about social sustainability, since the time of Thomas Malthus writing at the turn of the 18th century. Our ability to achieve sustainable development may well depend on the dynamics of the world’s population. Certainly, the global human population is rising, and looks set to peak at around 10 billion people, causing an unprecedented ‘planetary emergency’ according to some accounts (Emmott, 2013). But to what extent are our numbers really our problem? This is the thorny issue taken up by Danny Dorling in Chapter 7. Part of the social sustainability challenge here surely is how to cope with world population dynamics. There may be problems and issues in some of the assumptions underpinning the UN world population projections, fewer babies are being born for example (people are also now leading longer lives, the focus in Chapter 8). Here Dorling considers changing population dynamics for each of the world regions. However, what may ultimately matter most for social sustainability and social wellbeing is how equitable a country is. When a country is equitable, like Finland, people do not have to think of having more children in future to help pay for their own old age. People are treated well enough regardless of how many children they have, or if they have none at all. It may seem impossible to think that this will ever happen to some of the poorest and most inequitable countries but, as Dorling points out, just a century ago Finland was a relatively poor country.
In Chapter 8, Alan Walker critically examines the implications of the major demographic shifts in global population age structures in relation to the thorny question of social sustainably. Here the scope of global ageing is summarised by Walker, and the relationship between ageing and sustainability is considered in the context of global social policy debates, and in the language streams deployed by the international financial institutions, the IMF and World Bank, which reveals the heavy emphasis on the economic dimension, with the exclusion of the environmental and social ones. However, it is with the development of the WHO’s policy framework on ‘active ageing’ in 2002, relabelled ‘healthy ageing’ in 2015, which brought global ageing policy closer to the UN’s sustainable development agenda. Indeed, the WHO now began to integrate its healthy ageing strategy with the SDGs. Walker therefore demonstrates how global discourses on ageing and sustainability have consistently ignored the ageing process and environmental and social sustainability. It is only very recently that attempts have been made to bring these different perspectives together. Nevertheless, existing global social policy frameworks still require more and better alignment if ageing is to become fully integrated with economic, environmental and social sustainability.
The impact of globalization and the movement of people on the making of social policy and global migration complicates the social question, increasing framed as the ‘global’ social question or ‘transnational’ social question. Article 13 of the UDHR affirms the right of everyone to ‘leave any country’ (the right to emigrate), but this is not the same thing as the right to enter a country (the right to immigrate), to work and access benefits. In Chapter 9, Edward Koning considers social conflict on a transnational scale. Policy makers are increasingly being challenged on how to maintain solidarity and cohesion in societies experiencing intergroup tension. Modern welfare states need to decide on the nature of rights and how rights may be differentiated, depending on status categories. Policy makers therefore face a difficult decision regarding which of the existing social benefits should be accessible to immigrants, and whether new benefits should be created that exclusively target immigrants to help promote social and economic integration. Residence status remains important here. As Koning notes, few policy makers would prefer not to advocate blatant discrimination between native-born and naturalized citizens, but equally welfare states tend not to grant those without legal status full access to welfare services. But beyond these two extremes, there are tough choices ahead in determining the rights of permanent, temporary and undocumented migrants. Approaches to rights differentiation vary considerably from country to country. Migration does indeed pose a formidable challenge to the future sustainability of the welfare state, even if the challenge turns out to be more political in nature than economic. In the face of growing welfare chauvinism in the electorate, and with the rise of anti-immigrant politicians and anti-immigrant parties (AIPs), the immediate outlook seems bleak for transnational solidarity and the social of social policy, at least in the present climate.
In Chapter 10, Fiona Williams illustrates how an intersectional approach can excavate the ‘social’ in social policy analysis, not only at national and local/interpersonal scales but at global scales too. Here Williams focuses on the forces at the global scale that have shaped the development of post-financial crisis (austerity) welfare and the global pandemic of COVID-19, which should be understood in terms of the intersections between the crises of global financialised capitalism, of care, of ecology and of racialized transnational mobilities. The four crises are interconnected; they have commonalities in constitution and effect, as well as interlocking dynamics and mechanisms. They are linked by the ways each jeopardizes security, human solidarity and sustainability for future generations. The commonalities include that they challenge the patriarchal, racial and ecosocial dimensions of neoliberal capitalism and its modes of production, reproduction, consumption, accumulation, commodification and growth, of which they are the outcome. An intersectionality approach is able to find synergies and shared understanding across progressive movements for care, decoloniality, environmental and economic justice. Together recent global events and social movements and formations create possibilities for alliances and transformatory alternatives, and they may provide the basis at least for thinking about new welfare states that focus on sustaining the social.
Intersectionality and intersectional analysis are a recurrent theme and approach in this volume, which continues in Chapter 11, where Jane Jenson considers global social policy making and the quasi-concept of social cohesion. It is a quasi-concept, according to Jenson, not least because no shared definition of social cohesion actually exists in the literature. But also, importantly, because of the way it is used empirically by policy makers (often in relation to a set or ‘dashboard’ of social indicators, for example), while at the same time remaining sufficiently flexible to be deployed by policy makers in policy instruments, at different levels, and within and across different spatial scales; for example, from individuals to communities, and from nation-states to the world regions and increasingly in a global context. Here Jenson examines and compares the work and policy approaches of the international institutions the World Bank, the UN and the WHO, as well as the work of regional actors like the EU. Some of the policy tools, documents and instruments for fostering cohesive social relations appear quite general or broad-brushed, encompassing notions of social, economic and cultural integration, for example, while others are much narrower in scope, operationalizing or interpreting social cohesion according to notions of labour market participation, and other forms of ‘work’ and job creation initiatives.
In Chapter 12, Gary Craig considers the prospects for global social justice in light of the UN 2030 Agenda seeking to better integrate economic, social