Between the world that is emerging from the great transitions underway (climatic, cultural, demographic, digital…) and the public policies inherited from the old social contract (also in its neoliberal challenges) a systemic mismatch occurs. The classic welfare state was the answer, but the change of era alters the questions.
The radical complexities and uncertainties we face require strong dynamics of collective action and protection. The values and ways of implementing this protection, however, require transformations that can be explored from a triple axis: innovate, democratize and territorialize public policies.
Innovate (build fraternity)
At the core of a new ecosocial contract for the 21st century lies the articulation of equality with differences, and of personal autonomy with community connection. Economic and cultural gaps intersect in inequalities and discrimination. Overcoming both requires linking equality policies (predistributive and redistributive) with policies of recognition of diversities of origin, gender, age or functional.
Collective rights, on the other hand, are rewritten from grammars of personal self-determination; Without them, equality always hides relations of domination. But autonomy processes are inscribed in logics of interdependence, they only make sense in frameworks of collective bonding.
Public policies, therefore, face the challenge of building community, of weaving everyday environments configured by ties of mutual support and networks of solidarity. In practice, moving through this axis of innovation would imply building a more fraternal, more republican social citizenship. This leads us to two paradigmatic areas of the (new) welfare state.
First of all, the income guarantee. Within the framework of industrial society, wages operated as the great device for distributing wealth. The change of era alters the parameters: the generation of value becomes more social and immaterial; the centrality of work loses strength in a cultural key; and the ecological transition weakens jobs and old productive schemes.
This is where basic income – a universal, individual and unconditional benefit – could play a key role on the path towards innovative logics of social citizenship. It is a tool that moves entry from the labor market to the field of rights; expands the perimeter of decommodification towards the guarantee of the material bases of life.
The basic income connects social citizenship with personal autonomy, empowers against scenarios of domination and generates, at the same time, conditions for the articulation of links and networks of mutual support.
Secondly, care. The cause of fraternity is disputed, above all, in the field of daily care and community practices of reciprocity. In scenarios of social innovation, the right to care should acquire a level of universality and guarantee equivalent to health and education; and public care policies have a degree of centrality comparable to the classic policies of the welfare state.
In the instruments of action, a range of possibilities opens up: from universal benefits for upbringing and socio-educational networks for early childhood, to community articulation formulas inscribed in feminist agendas (the ‘Vila Veïna’ municipal program in Barcelona…).
In summary, subjective rights, public policies and collective care practices that recognize vulnerabilities and interdependencies, but reduce risks of relational exclusion and contribute to strengthening structures of solidarity.
Democratize (build the common)
The welfare state developed a bureaucratic scheme of public management with Weberian roots: rigid administrative structures; standardization of services; and professional paternalism that relegates citizens to passive roles. The neoliberal offensive then designed the ‘new public management’ (NGP) model: transfer of commercial logic to the public sphere, outsourcing and replacement of citizens with clients.
Today, the redefinition of well-being in a democratic key implies assuming the turn towards the common: overcoming both bureaucratic monopolism and NPM and bringing collective protection to the logic of citizen participation. Democratizing social rights means articulating the institutional and the community: working at the intersections between the universalist potential of public policies and the cooperative potential of citizen practices.
It involves building a shared sphere where policy co-production, public-community agreements and collective action dynamics linked to the self-management of rights can be linked. It’s a paradigm shift. A welfare state aimed at structuring the common rather than managing bureaucracies: welfare to the commonfare.
And from theory to practice. In the recent double context of crisis and transitions, a new set of social initiatives emerges that operate as a democratizing engine of the collective sphere: they connect mobilization to the construction of the common. They adopt forms of urban ‘autonomy’ (recovered housing, popular schools, self-managed spaces); social innovation (shared parenting, neighborhood gardens, cooperative economy); and mutual support (community networks in the face of relational or material vulnerabilities).
The connection between innovative social policies and this type of collective action allows us to overcome the classic dilemma in terms of institutionality versus resistance; makes it possible -beyond this binarism- to generate a space for the articulation of public-community structures, woven around three possible logics.
The thematic logic: co-production of sectoral policies through horizontal networks that add public resources and collective intelligence (cooperative housing, local energy communities…).
The infrastructural logic: citizen heritage programs and civic management. Local public facilities (athenaeums, libraries, nursery schools…) have been shaping the physical geography of well-being. Civic management (through the associative fabric of the territory) creates the conditions to also convert them into their communal and democratic ecosystem: from public services to places of collective creation of citizenship (Klinenberg’s ‘people’s palaces’).
Neighborhood logic: dynamics that create strong neighborhoods and communities, with capacities for solving problems and improving living conditions. Here, the regeneration of vulnerable areas through socio-community action, or public support for territorial ecosystems of social economy (the ‘urban communities’ program in Catalonia), can be considered reference strategies.
Territorialize (build roots)
Industrial society generated national frameworks for managing class conflict, the social contract was forged in the space of states. Welfare regimes were built under centralized institutions. Towards the end of the 20th century, the territorial scheme begins to alter: restructuring breaks out in the space of public policies and collective practices.
Cities, in this process, keep the collective and democratic window open: proximity as a space in which to try to protect without closing; local governments as a lever for the protection of basic rights and community empowerment.
It is about setting the urban agenda, local well-being and local green transition strategies at the core of the new ecosocial contract: returning to cities the logic of emancipation that the 20th century had reserved for the states. The double challenge would arise, then, of rewriting the common from grammars of proximity, and of relocating in municipalism the key tools to make it possible. In short, more power in places, where things happen, where the collective talent to address them lies.
Connecting citizenship and territory, in practice, implies building a more rooted well-being, more sensitive to the possibility of dignified daily lives. And this is where policies linked to the right to the city operate strongly. Already in 1968, Henry Lefebvre published Le droit à la ville. His proposal involved inscribing social transformation in urban layouts: streets, squares and neighborhoods.
He returned to David Harvey and his Spaces of hope (2000), in days of alternatives to savage globalization. And it has exploded with force in the last decade, in line with urban collective action on a global scale: the defense of popular habitats against the dynamics of ‘planetary gentrification’ (Loretta Lees).
The right to the city, as a daily and community dimension of all basic rights, is gaining strength as a project for the collective reconstruction of democratic citizenship for the 21st century.
It takes shape in a triple dimension of intertwined policies: locating social rights (housing and neighborhoods, reception processes, links against loneliness); generate urban ecological transitions (food and energy sovereignty, healthy mobilities) and forge communal economies (cooperative networks and territories). In their interaction, these three thematic vertices can give rise to new logics of citizenship: shared prosperity rooted in habitable environments.
In summary, processes aimed at innovating, democratizing and territorializing the collective can operate, in an already mature context of changing times, as strategic routes towards a new ecosocial contract that surpasses the classic welfare state. The intersection of values (intersections of fraternity), public-community structures (spaces of the common) and the right to the city (rooting processes) emerge as main force ideas.
From there, the translation into public policies and collective practices occurs: basic income and care; alternative housing logics, social infrastructures and cooperative territories; neighborhood plans and local energy transitions… A wide range to lay the foundations for a possible social citizenship for the 21st century. Faced with the reactionary construction of fears and hatred, a proposal to explore paths of more democracy; to raise – discreetly – everyday utopias of hope.
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