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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Comparative Governance
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2024.1451406
This article is part of the Research Topic Public Policies in the Era of PermaCrisis View all 11 articles

Welfare State, Social Policy and Social Sustainability, within the context of the PermaCrisis

Provisionally accepted
Nikos Papadakis Nikos Papadakis 1*Stylianos Ioannis Tzagkarakis Stylianos Ioannis Tzagkarakis 2
  • 1 Department of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, University of Crete, Rethymno, Greece
  • 2 Hellenic Open University, Patras, Greece

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Sustainable development is based on three interrelated and equally important pillars; the environmental, the economic and the social. The social pillar involves building a framework that promotes the well-being of the whole population with the ultimate aim of preserving social cohesion, while reducing social discrimination. In our analysis, the concept of social sustainability refers to the need for the creation of a society that contains all the conditions for sustainable development in terms of equal opportunities for employment and social well-being.Currently, significant problems and dysfunctions exist as long as several European labor markets are fragmented with a strong insiders-outsiders divergence, jobpolarization, high labor market slack, high in-work poverty rates especially in precarious forms of employment. In Europe as well as globally, addressing these issues is of major importance in order to ensure social sustainability, given that the permacrisis (multiple crises), along with the Mega-Trends have a clear impact on the structure of economy and labour market, industrial relations systems, and business models. The present paper analyses the state of play of social sustainability in Europe and aims to identify specific policy responses that could offer viable solutions to old and emerging challenges in terms of social inclusion.

    Keywords: sustainable development, Social sustainability, Social Policy, Mega-trends, permacrisis, Welfare state

    Received: 19 Jun 2024; Accepted: 12 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Papadakis and Tzagkarakis. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Nikos Papadakis, Department of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, University of Crete, Rethymno, Greece

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