The climate and ecological emergencies are accelerating and tackling them becomes more urgent every day. More and more academics and policymakers take seriously evidence which suggests that decoupling economic growth from emissions and material use at the scale and speed required to stay within planetary boundaries does not currently look feasible. Several studies also argue that once certain levels of income are achieved, economic growth no longer significantly contributes to improving wellbeing and can be linked to increasing inequality and other social disbenefits. Post-growth has been suggested as an alternative – an economic system that is designed not to rely on economic growth but to safeguard people’s wellbeing within planetary boundaries.

However, within social policy, pro-growth positions prevail. One of the underlying assumptions is that growth is required to sustain welfare state funding, especially in a context of ageing societies. In this talk, Milena Büchs will challenge this view and discuss proposals from the literature on ways in which welfare states could be funded in a post-growth context, including wealth and environmental taxes, and ideas from modern monetary theory on money creation through government spending. The analysis will suggest that while there are inevitable links between changes in the size of the economy and changes in revenues or available funding at given levels of taxation, this does not necessarily imply that the provision of welfare relies on a growth-based economy. The talk will then discuss which other levers become important from a post-growth perspective for providing welfare without growth.

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Milena Büchs is Professor of Sustainable Welfare at the University of Leeds. She specialises in sustainable welfare, eco-social policy and climate justice.

Milena started applying a social policy lens to climate change issues around 18 years ago after completing a PhD in European social policy at the Humboldt University Berlin. She held a lectureship in sociology and social policy at the University of Southampton from 2005 onwards before joining the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds in 2016.

Milena has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and two books, and has been Principal and Co-Investigator on several large research projects. Currently, she is a Co-I on the Horizon Europe projects “ToBe – Towards an Economy for Sustainable Wellbeing” and “MAPS – Models, Assessment and Policy for Sustainability”.

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