Professor Liisa Häikiö's presentation from "What Is an Eco-Welfare State" seminar held in Helsinki January 21st 2020. Find out more at www.ecowelfare.fi/en/.

1. Eco-welfare state in the making: New research agenda
Prof. Liisa Häikiö, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University

2. ORSI: Towards eco-welfare state.
Orchestrating systemic impact
SRC: 2019–2022(25)
www.ecowelfare.fi/en/
TAU, SYKE, VTT, Aalto
We aim to develop steering
practices that enable the
transformation to a Finnish
eco-welfare state with
ecologically effective and
societally legitimate
measures.
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3. Major global challenge
How meet needs of today without
threatening possibilities of meeting
the needs in the future?
Steering of transformation has
failed to guide societies to meet
ecological limits in a socially just
way.
This challenge points especially to
affluent western nation states.
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4. From welfare state to eco-welfare state
Established welfare states need to integrate social policies with
environmental policies in new ways to ensure and protect welfare
needs of their citizens, global community and future generations.
Integration of environmental and social problems and measures means
that welfare states evolve into eco-welfare states (Gough 2016).
Transformation requires novel understanding on how to organize
governance to integrate ecological and social targets in multi-actor and
multi-level contexts.
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5. Eco-welfare state: A new emerging frame
ØA state more actively intervenes to support
industrial transformations in relation to climate
change
ØWelfare states may enable arrangements
helping to govern the negative impacts, to
reduce carbon emissions and to support
innovation
ØA need to integrate policies and create policy
instruments that serve goals of providing
material wellbeing, advancing social justice and
meeting planetary boundaries simultaneously
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6. An active and interventionist innovative state
• Eco-welfare state presents a governance challenge:
– conflicting targets on combining effective societal steering
– integrated social and environmental policy governance
networks
– socially just solutions
– participation of all
• The current societal steering mechanisms with sector-specific
measures and targets bound by limited electoral and budgetary
terms cannot provide a solution.
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7. Eco-welfare state is a societal transition
process:
Transformation of thinking, institutional
practices, and organisational cultures, as well
as novel measures to mingle societal activities
with ecological limits
Societal steering towards an eco-welfare state:
Focus on impact-driven governance, orchestrating
systemic impacts and normative
conceptualizations and ethical practices within
these
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8. Integration in
society and in
research
Innovation
resolves social
problems
Focus on future
matters, not
detailed
operational
principles
Multiple paths,
not one: path
dependencies &
contextual
factors
Transformation
is an open-
ended process
Participation
and co-creation
as ways of
doing things
Transition
involves losers
and winners
Power and
conflict?
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