Habitus and climate change: Exploring support and resistance to sustainable welfare and social–ecological transformations in Sweden

Abstract

We explore peoples' dispositions and practices with regard to social–ecological transformations based on a sustainable welfare policy strategy in Sweden. We draw on Bourdieu's concept of habitus to highlight the relations between social positions, dispositions, and position‐takings. Using data from an own survey, we identify habitus types and place these in the space of social positions. We apply principal component analysis to a large set of questions about social, ecological, and climate change related topics and identify eight underlying eco–social dispositions. These are used for cluster analyses that find typical constellations of eco–social dispositions within the Swedish population: variants of eco–social habitus. We find seven habitus types and describe their social characteristics, political preferences, and practices. Finally, the seven habitus are plotted onto the map of social positions, the Bourdieusian social space, highlighting their relations—proximities, tensions, and contestations—to each other. We find evidence that political struggles around social–ecological transformations reproduce existing social structures but are also connected to new “eco–social” divisions that appear between groups in similar positions. In the conclusion we discuss the implications for social–ecological transformations based on sustainable welfare.

Deliberating a Sustainable Welfare–Work Nexus

“…Indeed, a significant share of the electorate seem to believe in the “trickle-down” effect: to not regulate economic growth, and the rich will be in the interest of the poor as well (Fritz et al. 2021 ). In addition, since it is part of the collective consciousness that a range of institutions—such as the legal, educational, and welfare systems, which have proven to be crucial for the relatively high subjective well-being scores measured in Western societies—historically codeveloped with the provision of economic growth and are presently coupled to it, any political move beyond the capitalist growth economy would need to reckon with concerns about well-being loss, anomie, and social exclusion (Büchs and Koch 2017 ).…”

Harnessing welfare state theories to explain the emergence of eco-social policies

“…Little attention in this emerging literature has been paid to socio-political actors’ behaviour and preferences and to how these affect the policymaking process. In fact, recent publications have preferred to focus on ‘eco-social divides’ in the electorate's attitudes (Gugushvili and Otto, 2021): some of these studies investigate whether citizens supporting social policies also support environmental ones (Fritz et al, 2021; Fritz and Koch, 2019; Otto and Gugushvili, 2020), while others search for potential trade-offs (Armingeon and Bürgisser, 2021; Jakobsson et al, 2018). All of these studies focus on public opinion, whereas, to the author's knowledge, contributions examining the partisan and interest-group politics of eco-social policies are still lacking.…”

The role of work and social protection systems in social-ecological transformations: Insights from deliberative citizen forums in Sweden

“…Secondly, it is precisely due to this stable work-welfare nexus, which was established and functioned rather successively during the golden period of the Fordist industrial capitalism, that efforts to reconceptualise the role of work in a social-ecological transformation process might encounter resistance and challenges (Lee et al, 2023). Lastly, initial hopes that the social democratic welfare state would somewhat automatically turn into a green state were not realised (Fritz et al, 2021).…”