Rethinking Social Policy in the Anthropocene: Balancing Social Floors and Ecological Ceilings for Sustainable Welfare

As living standards and the demands for social rights increase among the nations of the world, this will lead to a concomitant pressure on nature. This exposes a crucial contradiction that affects much of contemporary social policy design and delivery: the focus on setting and delivering certain minimum thresholds for welfare needs at the expense of boundaries and limits. Yet, limiting the impact of human society to certain planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009) where we consider both the social floors and ecological ceilings of social policy (Haworth, 2017). This is where the concepts of “ceilings, sufficiency and maximum income” come into focus. We approach this first by reconceptualising social rights from an ecological perspective, applying Michel Serres concept of the ‘natural contract’ to rethinking the relationship between society and nature. We review the existing broad-ranging work on sufficiency and ceilings in order to propose a framework for thinking about maximum (instead of minimum) income as a response to this crucially important social policy contradiction in the Anthropocene. This has implications for how social policy can deal with the two crucial contradictions at its heart - growth and consumption.