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This account of intersecting global crises provides a frame for understanding the development of and challenges to neoliberal and austerity welfare states. But it does not indicate the position played by institutional social policies (national, regional or global) in mediating or mitigating these crises, or how some of the logics described in this chapter enter the political or social (b)ordering of society through nation-state welfare. Nor do we get a view of some of the equally salient but hidden aspects, such as the shifts in heteronormativity, or the impact on disabled groups, or what relevance environmental policies have to social policies. It is also the case that none of these crises or their intersections is manifested in national welfare states in the same ways but, rather, depends on their legacies, social formations and forces, and path dependencies. To look at these issues requires a different but related framing that can translate these global crises into an analysis of the specific institutional, discursive and contested social policies and intersecting social relations at the national scale. (See figure 3.1 on p. 54.)

The framework of the intersecting social relations of family, nation, work and nature derives from one that has helped guide my critical understanding of both welfare states and the discipline of social policy (for example, Williams 1989, 1992, 1995, 2001, 2012, 2018). The proposition I originally applied is that family, nation and work constitute central organizing principles that shape and are shaped by welfare states. They are shaped differently in different countries according to particular institutional and cultural legacies, path dependencies and power relations. I explain these before looking at the fourth domain of ‘nature’. The three domains signify what stands for family life, care and intimacy (family); nation, nationhood, nationality, population and citizenship (nation); and paid and unpaid labour (work); and the social relations of power and inequality through which they are constituted. It is important to emphasize that the terms are signifiers for domains of difference and complexity; they are not prescriptive. Indeed, in relation to ‘family’, in chapter 7 I argue, for example, that ‘care’ represents a more inclusive organizing principle for society than ‘family’. As signifiers they recognize that the meanings attached to the three domains are socially constructed and that they change in form and meaning over time and place. They are constituted not only through institutional policies and governmental techniques and practices promoted by political actors (through welfare, education, law, etc.) but also through their material conditions, power relations, (competing) discourses, and different social and cultural norms, beliefs and practices, as well as by claims made by civil society through social movements or campaigns or other social forces. (Appendix I provides a fuller description of the constituents of all four domains and their intersections with welfare states.)

Figure 3.1 Framing the intersections of neoliberal welfare

Importantly, the three domains, like the social relations through which they are organized, are not fixed but constantly intersecting – making and remaking each other. For example, the implementation of child-care policies can change the gender composition of the workforce, which in its turn may shift women’s and men’s understanding of what they want from relationships. The conception of national identity as ‘tolerant’ because a country is multi-ethnic and has race discrimination policies and same-gender marriage legislation may denote progressive attitudes which nevertheless are rooted in a binary position where the heteronormative and/or ethnically dominant have the power to allow ‘others’ to be ‘tolerated’. In this way, the framework points to the significance of salient and intersecting social relations (class, gender, race, disability, sexuality, age, and so on) within the economic, political, social and governmental aspects of welfare states. They can be understood as the domains that help constitute and challenge the social, material and moral hierarchies of welfare subjects.

At the same time, these are often contradictory, uneven and contested domains, as are the social policies that shape and are shaped by them. Welfare governance in this way can be understood as an ongoing attempt to ‘settle’ the changing and challenging conditions of family, nation and work. Welfare settlements often reinscribe lines of inclusion, exclusion and marginalization, and these can create fault lines which surface later. For example, as described earlier, the post-war welfare state represented an important set of social policies that served to protect people’s welfare and wellbeing from cradle to grave. However, it did so within a context of colonialism and a conception of citizenship in which women in general and men and women migrants from the former colonies were constructed as second-class citizens and excluded from access, directly or indirectly, to many benefits and services. By the 1960s and 1970s, social movements began to challenge these exclusions. The New Right under Margaret Thatcher serves as a second example. The New Right’s settlement attempt combined welfare neoliberalism with a social conservatism which linked traditional ideas of the male breadwinner family and a nation of empire to the need for a strong state, less state intervention, and a concerted attack on those who threatened family, nation or work. These threats were embodied in lone mothers, those who defended or practised same-gender relationships, BAME youth, the trade unions and striking miners. This was an intense struggle by the New Right to settle the dislocations and contradictions of deindustrializing post-Fordist conditions of work and the post-traditionalist and postcolonial hierarchies of family and nation. In the end it was not only their economic policies but the mismatch of their attempt to resettle the social by moving backwards in time, compared with the reality of, in particular, new family forms, a multicultural society and working mothers, that contributed to their defeat in 1997 by New Labour, who promised ‘modernization’ of the economic, the social and the organizational.

The application of the family–nation–work framework has changed over time. At a simple level, it’s an aide-mémoire of aspects and dynamics to keep in mind in any social policy analysis that seeks a more complex understanding of contemporary social relations. In this way it also provides the conceptual means to critique social policy ideas and approaches using an intersectional analysis. More broadly it offers a way of capturing the multifaceted and intersecting social dimensions of change and contestation in welfare states at the national or sub-/supranational scale, which are also understood as articulating with global social and economic conditions. These conditions in the twenty-first century, I have suggested, are represented by four intersecting crises. Thus family–nation–work loosely reiterates the crises of care, racialized borders and financialized capitalism. However, it is also necessary to register the crisis of climate change and the environment within the family–nation–work framework in order to take up the serious critiques that have developed within the discipline of social policy in this century. These argue for a radical rethinking of future social policy in terms of the urgent priorities of ecological degradation and climate change. In addition, they introduce a new set of interdependencies and relations of power between human and the non-human and living world. Two of the most developed attempts to rethink this from the perspective of social policy come from Tony Fitzpatrick and Ian Gough, who develop proposals for eco-social policy (or eco-welfare) that bring measures to reduce the risks of climate change and enhance sustainability into alignment with social policy (Fitzpatrick 2011, 2014; Gough 2017; see also Fitzpatrick and Cahill 2002; Snell and Haq 2014, O’Neill et al. 2018). Here I summarize the main arguments for such an alignment.

First is a need to recognize the interdependence between social policies aiming to meet basic needs and reduce inequalities and the achievement of sustainability. The forms of globalized capital accumulation, the constant goal of economic growth, the rise in inequalities and the decline in social welfare infrastructure need to be tackled together. This means understanding the way in which environmental justice is linked to social and economic justice, including intergenerational justice. As the previous section outlined, it is those in the most disadvantaged socio-economic groups and regions of the world, especially women, who are at greatest risk from the effects of climate change (Robinson 2018). Within developed nations, climatic events, air pollution, toxic emissions, fuel poverty, food insecurity, transport costs and an insecure, deregulated housing market affect the welfare of the poorest communities, particularly where degradation of the planet meets racial injustice (Anthony 2017). Each of these encompasses issues to do with environmental policies.

Second is the question as to how sustainability, adaptation and mitigation policies can be developed and implemented in ways that are socially just and equitable. For example, a carbon tax would be regressive on poorer individuals, especially those who have less access to resources to decarbonize their cars or houses. A food or fuel policy that depended on individual household responsibility for reorganization could fall disproportionately on poorer women.

Third, this means addressing how social protection, employment, health, education, social care and wellbeing can be developed in a sustainable manner. For example, at a practical level, how far do employment policies generate sustainable jobs, and how far are houses, schools and hospital buildings run on eco-friendly technology? More broadly, the economic model of developed welfare states has been dependent in part on tax revenues that in turn depend on a growth economy and, with it, the prioritization of productivism, the ethic of paid work and a consumptionbased society. Social insurance is a system of dealing with individual and calculable risk, but the effects of climate change (and pandemics) are both unpredictable and can affect large populations and countries. This requires a different approach to security and protection that is geared towards long-term collective solutions and international governance and solidarity. It presupposes the importance of global governance, but also, since many policies to deal with the sources of planetary instability imply changes in everyday practices, forms of participatory democracy at local community level (see chapter 7).

In this short description it becomes clear that the dynamics of family–nation–work and welfare are integral to environmental inequalities and to the determination of future eco-social policy. The framework is therefore extended to family, nation, work and nature (see appendix I). In this way nature signifies the conditions, social relations, changes and challenges of the human and non-human eco-system. The meanings and discourses, policies and practices attached to this domain, as with family, nation and work, shift over time and place.⁴ This part of the framework is relatively formative at this stage, reflecting the early integration of social and environmental policies in practice. It seeks to inform the book’s orientation, analysis and praxis in order to recognize the argument for integrating social with environmental policy. It does this (i) by developing the intersections of the ecological crisis with other global crises; (ii) by illustrating, where salient, the ways in which environmental injustice intersects with the complexities of welfare-related social inequalities, most notably in an analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic; (iii) by applying an intersectional approach to understanding collective action by environmentalists and others with a view to possibilities for alliances; and (iv) by examining synergies and tensions in the political ethics of care, environmentalism and decoloniality and in their and others’ prefigurative programmes for transforming the welfare state into an eco-welfare commons.