Volume 4, Issue 2

How is a basic income (BI) linked to growth and ecological sustainability? Should it be financed from more production, natural resource rents or green taxes? Should a BI be introduced globally rather than in the already rich countries? There is a case on equity grounds for linking a BI to ecological taxes and degrowth in the overconsuming societies, but to use BI as a tool for improving production in poverty struck regions.

Probably the most demanding challenge for securing sustainable development consists of changing the unsustainable consumption patterns in rich Western societies, which are the main cause of the ongoing environmental crisis. Would a basic income help achieve this objective? I argue that a transition to sustainable consumption requires three different but complementary strategies: eco-efficiency, sufficiency and decommodification. While the impact of basic income on eco-efficiency is uncertain, it could and should play a central role in a framework of sustainability in which the latter two strategies are emphasised.

Political ecology can be more than a concern with the environment or a fuzzy doctrine, somewhere between the liberal right and the socialist left. To see this, one needs to deploy the political space so as to make room, next to the market and the state, for what André Gorz proposed to call the “autonomous sphere,” and one needs to understand, as Gorz eventually did, the close connection between political ecology so conceived and the idea of an unconditional basic income.

This article discusses Basic Income (BI) in the context of post-productivism. It defines post-productivism as an ethic of reproductive value and argues that BI is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the realisation of such value. However, against those who would abandon or else severely dilute liberal justifications for BI, it defends a liberal framework, albeit one that is broadly consistent with recent republican contributions to the debate. It concludes that BI can be justified as that which expands the spectrum of social goods but that a BI scheme should neither ignore those social conditions that are likely to enhance autonomy nor the social associations through which reproductive value can be promoted.

This article sets out and briefly explores three main contentions. One is that mobility is a crucial aspect of social stratification – such that “transport disadvantage” is intimately tied up with social exclusion more generally. A second is that insofar as there is a green case for basic income (BI), there seems also, for similar reasons, to be a green case for free public transport. The third is that even while such a step might be deemed necessary for social and environmental justice, it is (unsurprisingly) by no means sufficient to achieve either.