In our final post of this series, we have some cross-sections of Professor Mary Murphy (Maynooth University) speaking about the importance of the intersection between climate change and inequality.
Prof Murphy stressed the importance of research at this critical time, saying it is “a time for revolution, not patching” in that patching up policy or making small changes was not going to be enough.
1. Professor Mary Murphy – What Do We Need for Change to Happen
So just some core concepts and assumptions change. I mean, we were all talking about change and the basic political science kind of standard theory on change is that for change to happen, you need institutional fit, you need policy opportunity and you need learning processes. And to some degree, the policy opportunity seems to me maybe the most obvious thing that we might have.
But the institutional fit we’ve been talking about, how difficult it is to fit the legislative frameworks and the the actual, you know, regimes, the welfare regimes together and the learning processes, apart from what Madeleine outlined and Helen outlined some as well. And, you know, this may be the beginning of a bigger learning process that we’re all getting into together. So there is still the question, though, of the institutional fit and whether or not you achieve change through incremental tweaking and merging together or whether you accept that it’s difficult to get an institutional fit.
So you tear it up and you say, let’s use it as an opportunity for new thinking. And I’m in that space very much in terms of encouraging a social imaginary, which is a sociological concept and refers to like, how do people use their imagination to really rethink about values, institutions, law and symbols to imagine a different type of reality? And my argument is we’re in poly crisis, we’re in perma-crisis, we’ve artificial intelligence, we’ve climate, we’ve inequality, we’ve democratic challenges, clearly with the far right. And we’re going to see big change on the island of Ireland for all of those reasons, never mind for the constitutional question that’s lurking at the back of all the things as well.
So but despite all those kind of changes, I do believe that that future is relatively open and the change may be inevitable, but what it will be and what it will end up like is not. And that’s why we do need to think of in terms of an all island welfare imaginary. And the last thing is social security or welfare.
Do we take a narrow or a wide understanding of that? I think to the degree that both I mean, Helen Johnson in particular said it this morning, that one way that the welfare state was conceptualised in the south was really to understand the relationship between society and economy, but also very much never to talk about income supports without also talking about services and understanding the relationship between the two, because we can never determine is income adequate enough because we always have to stay adequate for what? And the answer to the for what is, well, what can you get by services that you’re not trying to compensate for with income? So to my mind, I think we have to think quite widely about the frame for welfare when we’re thinking about social security. I also think that we need to, you know, start talking about well-being societies and careful societies as a way of a shorthand way of making sure that we’re talking about a quite different type of welfare state to the one that we have at the moment.
2. Professor Mary Murphy – Putting Care and Wellbeing at the Heart of the Future Welfare State
And that’s the common solutions I think needs to go back to the fundamental issues about, well, what do we need? What do we need as people to survive and thrive on this planet? And most of the literature on well-being, capability theory, care theory, feminist theory, it really does stress that we need very much similar things. We need well-being, we need social participation, we need physical and mental health, we need autonomous right to do things, we need to be able to be cognitive individuals, and we need opportunities to participate. There are fundamental needs.
And then we need some second order things that help us achieve the first order things. But we all need them. Your biggest enemy needs those things, as well as your best friend.
So given that we are all starting from the same place, I think there is something fundamental about saying, well, can we reimagine welfare to enable it to meet what we actually need?
All-Island Social Security Network 