Ian Gough
Biographic Data
| ID | 271256 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ian Gough |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ian |
| FAMILY NAME | Gough |
| SIGNATURE | GOUGH I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bath |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0597-3106 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 999 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 68 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Meeting housing needs within planetary boundaries: A UK case study
Provisioning for sufficiency: Envisaging production corridors
This article deepens the framework of a sufficiency economy, defining sufficiency as the space between a floor of meeting needs and a ceiling of ungeneralizable excess. This framework can be applied to the domains of consumption and production. Complementing existing research on consumption corridors, our aim is to conceptualize the idea of a production corridor. To develop this notion, we survey a range of helpful concepts starting with objectiv…
Two Scenarios for Sustainable Welfare: A Framework for an Eco-Social Contract
More nation states are now committing to zero net carbon by 2050 at the latest, which is encouraging, but none have faced up to the transformation of economies, societies and lives that this will entail. This article considers two scenarios for a fair transition to net zero, concentrating only on climate change, and discusses the implications for contemporary ‘welfare states’. The first is the Green New Deal framework coupled with a ‘social guara…
Universal Basic Services: A Theoretical and Moral Framework
The case for Universal Basic Services ( UBS ) is a recent idea that is attracting much attention. This article provides a theoretical justification for extending the delivery of public services, as an alternative to the longer‐standing argument for Universal Basic Income ( UBI ). It rests on human need theory and the concept of provisioning systems. Both recognise the irreducible heterogeneity of consumption, the multi‐faceted nature of human nee…
Heat, Greed and Human Need: Climate Change, Capitalism and Sustainable Wellbeing
This book builds an essential bridge between climate change and social policy. Combining ethics and human need theory with political economy and climate science, it offers a long-term, interdisciplinary analysis of the prospects for sustainable development and social justice. Beyond ‘green growth’ (which assumes an unprecedented rise in the emissions efficiency of production) it envisages two further policy stages vital for rich countries: a prog…
Welfare states and environmental states: A Comparative Analysis
A framework is presented for thinking about state intervention in developed capitalist economies in two domains: social policy and environmental policy (and, within that, climate-change policy). Five drivers of welfare state development are identified, the ‘five Is’ of Industrialisation: Interests, Institutions, Ideas/Ideologies, and International Influences. Research applying this framework to the postwar development of welfare states in the OEC…
Climate change and sustainable welfare: The centrality of human needs: Fig. 1.
Since climate change threatens human well-being across the globe and into the future, we require a concept of well-being that encompasses an equivalent ambit. This article argues that only a concept of human need can do the work required. It compares need theory with three alternative approaches. Preference satisfaction theory is criticised on the grounds of subjectivity, epistemic irrationality, endogenous and adaptive preferences, the limitless…
The Political Economy of Prevention
Prevention in public policy is much discussed but rarely theorized. This article begins with a theoretical framework for reflecting on the political economy of prevention in advanced capitalist economies that integrates the analysis of preventive policies across the social, environmental and economic domains. The next two sections survey prevention initiatives in social policy and climate change policy, respectively. These mainly focus on the las…
Capabilities, Gender, Equality: Towards Fundamental Entitlements
Questions of gender, injustice and equality pervade all our lives, and as such, the capabilities or 'human development' approach to understanding well-being and basic political entitlements continues to be debated. In this thought-provoking book, a range of authors provide unique reflections on the capabilities approach and, specifically, Martha C. Nussbaum's contributions to issues of gender, equality and political liberalism. Moreover, the auth…
Social policy regimes in the developing world
Climate change, social policy, and global governance
This paper considers the challenge to global social policy posed by global climate change. It sets side by side global social policies and global climate change policies, and surveys the governance of each. The first part summarises global social policy in recent years, distinguishing (1) the policies and practices pursued in the global arena, and (2) the structures of global governance and the role of significant global actors. The second part r…
Carbon Mitigation Policies, Distributional Dilemmas and Social Policies
Contemporary policies to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) will have distributive consequences and thus implications for the scope and remit of social policy. This paper studies current carbon mitigation policies and their distributive impacts. It considers a range of current and proposed social programmes to ameliorate these impacts, before proposing alternatives. This argument is pursued in two parts according to whether emissions are…
Reply to Michael Hill 1
Decarbonizing the Welfare State
Over the twentieth century the welfare state emerged as one of the most conspicuous features of the modern polity. Together with a market-mediated economy with concentrated private ownership of the principal productive assets, and political systems with multi-party elections and fairly extensive individual rights, the welfare state helps define the basic character of contemporary developed societies. This article focuses on linkages between clima…
Financing welfare regimes: Mapping heterogeneous revenue structures
Gough I, Abu Sharkh M. Financing welfare regimes: mapping heterogeneous revenue structures Int J Soc Welfare 2011: 20: 280–291 © 2011 United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), International Journal of Social Welfare © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. This article studies how the composition of public revenues in terms of sources (such as taxation, social insurance contribution…
Economic crisis, climate change and the future of welfare states
This article discusses the future(s) of Western welfare states in the face of two systemic challenges: the economic crisis and the pressures of climate change. It uses a punctuated equilibrium framework of institutional change to argue for path dependency in welfare reform alongside crisis-driven switching points. The second part argues that the economic crisis of 2008 was endogenous to the preceding era of financialised capitalism, and that it w…
Global Welfare Regimes: A Cluster Analysis
This article tests the claim that a small number of distinct ‘welfare regimes’, combining institutional patterns and social welfare outcomes, can be identified across the developing world. It develops a methodology for clustering a large number of developing countries, identifying and ranking their welfare regimes, assessing their stability over the decade 1990—2000, and relating these to important structural variables. It confirms the distinctio…
Jesp symposium: Climate change and social policy
Climate change is surely one of the most encompassing and egregious threats in Europe today, so it is appropriate that we consider its implications for social policy in Europe. It is true that climate change is a separate agenda, the preserve of a distinct academic and epistemic community, scholarly discourse, policy community, institutional structures and modes of governance; but the linkages between these two issues – climate change and its pol…
Wellbeing in Developing Countries: From Theory to Research
In a world where many experience unprecedented levels of wellbeing, chronic poverty remains a major concern for many developing countries and the international community. Conventional frameworks for understanding development and poverty have focused on money, commodities and economic growth. This 2007 book challenges these conventional approaches and contributes to a new paradigm for development centred on human wellbeing. Poor people are not def…
A Comparative Welfare Regime Approach to Global Social Policy
Autonomy or Dependence - or Both: Perspectives from Bangladesh
Social Policy Regimes in the Developing World
The current context of social policy is one in which many of the old certainties of the past have been eroded. The predominantly inward-looking, domestic preoccupation of social policy has made way for a more integrated, international and outward approach to analysis which looks beyond the boundaries of the state. It is in this context that this Handbook brings together the work of key commentators in the field of comparative analysis in order to…
Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America: Social Policy in Development Contexts
Written by a team of internationally respected experts, this book explores the conditions under which social policy, defined as the public pursuit of secure welfare, operates in the poorer regions of the world. Social policy in advanced capitalist countries operates through state intervention to compensate for the inadequate welfare outcomes of the labour market. Such welfare regimes cannot easily be reproduced in poorer regions of the world wher…
Conceptualising in/security regimes
This chapter is one result of our dialogue between European social policy and the sociology of development. I was charged with the task of exploring how the concepts of 'welfare regime', 'social exclusion' and 'social policy' might be usefully adapted for understanding African realities in the context of a growing interest in the notion of 'global social policy' and the increasing merger of development and (military) security (Duffield 2001). My …
Informal security regimes: The strength of relationships
This chapter argues that the poorer regions of the world do not comfortably conform to the two key assumptions upon which the OECD model of welfare state regime relies: a legitimate state; and a pervasive, formal sector labour market. This immediately sets up the two key interactive issues of governance and the socio-economic circumstances of the common man (and woman). These circumstances are understood in this chapter through the metaphor of th…
A Theory of Human Need
Rejecting fashionable subjectivist and cultural relativist approaches, this important book argues that human beings have universal and objective needs for health and autonomy and a right to their optimal satisfaction. The authors develop a system of social indicators to show what such optimization would mean in practice and assess the records of a wide range of developed and underdeveloped economies in meeting their citizens' needs
A Comparative Welfare Regime Approach to Global Social Policy
Social Assistance in Oecd Countries
This article presents selected results from the first comparative study of social assistance across all 24 countries of the OECD. The scope of social assistance, discussed in the first section, is drawn to include all means-tested benefits in cash and kind, including those which provide benefits to higher income groups. The second section then presents in formation on the main programmes in each country, expenditures and groups of beneficia ries,…
Social Assistance in Southern Europe
This article summarizes social assistance programmes and outcomes in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey drawing material from a comparative study of OECD countries. A distinct social assistance regime is identified, characterized by the absence of a national minimum income safety net with categorical schemes for the aged and local discretionary relief for most other groups. Benefits are low or non‐existent and out of line with the rest of …
Social Assistance Regimes: A Cluster Analysis
Universal Basic Services: A Theoretical and Moral Framework
The case for Universal Basic Services ( UBS ) is a recent idea that is attracting much attention. This article provides a theoretical justification for extending the delivery of public services, as an alternative to the longer‐standing argument for Universal Basic Income ( UBI ). It rests on human need theory and the concept of provisioning systems. Both recognise the irreducible heterogeneity of consumption, the multi‐faceted nature of human nee…
Jesp symposium: Climate change and social policy
Climate change is surely one of the most encompassing and egregious threats in Europe today, so it is appropriate that we consider its implications for social policy in Europe. It is true that climate change is a separate agenda, the preserve of a distinct academic and epistemic community, scholarly discourse, policy community, institutional structures and modes of governance; but the linkages between these two issues – climate change and its pol…
Globalization and Regional Welfare Regimes: The East Asian Case
This article contributes to the ongoing debate about the impact of globalization on welfare systems across the world. Its argument is that economic globalization alters the global balance of forces compared with the ‘Golden Age’ of welfare capitalism, but that its impact on policies and outcomes is decisively mediated by national and regional ‘welfare regimes'. This argument has been developed in relation to the advanced capitalist countries of t…
Global Welfare Regimes: A Cluster Analysis
This article tests the claim that a small number of distinct ‘welfare regimes’, combining institutional patterns and social welfare outcomes, can be identified across the developing world. It develops a methodology for clustering a large number of developing countries, identifying and ranking their welfare regimes, assessing their stability over the decade 1990—2000, and relating these to important structural variables. It confirms the distinctio…
Autonomy or Dependence - or Both: Perspectives from Bangladesh
Two Scenarios for Sustainable Welfare: A Framework for an Eco-Social Contract
More nation states are now committing to zero net carbon by 2050 at the latest, which is encouraging, but none have faced up to the transformation of economies, societies and lives that this will entail. This article considers two scenarios for a fair transition to net zero, concentrating only on climate change, and discusses the implications for contemporary ‘welfare states’. The first is the Green New Deal framework coupled with a ‘social guara…
Welfare states and environmental states: A Comparative Analysis
A framework is presented for thinking about state intervention in developed capitalist economies in two domains: social policy and environmental policy (and, within that, climate-change policy). Five drivers of welfare state development are identified, the ‘five Is’ of Industrialisation: Interests, Institutions, Ideas/Ideologies, and International Influences. Research applying this framework to the postwar development of welfare states in the OEC…
Climate change, social policy, and global governance
This paper considers the challenge to global social policy posed by global climate change. It sets side by side global social policies and global climate change policies, and surveys the governance of each. The first part summarises global social policy in recent years, distinguishing (1) the policies and practices pursued in the global arena, and (2) the structures of global governance and the role of significant global actors. The second part r…
A theory of human needs
The Political Economy of Prevention
Prevention in public policy is much discussed but rarely theorized. This article begins with a theoretical framework for reflecting on the political economy of prevention in advanced capitalist economies that integrates the analysis of preventive policies across the social, environmental and economic domains. The next two sections survey prevention initiatives in social policy and climate change policy, respectively. These mainly focus on the las…
Carbon Mitigation Policies, Distributional Dilemmas and Social Policies
Contemporary policies to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) will have distributive consequences and thus implications for the scope and remit of social policy. This paper studies current carbon mitigation policies and their distributive impacts. It considers a range of current and proposed social programmes to ameliorate these impacts, before proposing alternatives. This argument is pursued in two parts according to whether emissions are…
Human Well-Being and Social Structures: Relating the Universal and the Local
There exists a contradiction between the domination of postmodernism and cultural relativism in intellectual life and the universalism and globalism dominant in the real world of institutions and politics. In this topsy-turvy world, core values and needs are relative and local, while means and policies are global and universal. This article contributes to those challenging this world-view. The first part looks at human well-being and contrasts th…
The Political Economy of the Welfare State
State Expenditure in Advanced Capitalism
The current stage of ‘neo-capitalism’ or ‘state monopoly capitalism’ is characterized by a qualitatively expanded role of the state in capitalist social formations. One expression of this huge politico-economic weight of the modern state is the prolonged expansion in state expenditures, such that they now exceed one half
Social welfare and competitiveness
Financing welfare regimes: Mapping heterogeneous revenue structures
Gough I, Abu Sharkh M. Financing welfare regimes: mapping heterogeneous revenue structures Int J Soc Welfare 2011: 20: 280–291 © 2011 United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), International Journal of Social Welfare © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. This article studies how the composition of public revenues in terms of sources (such as taxation, social insurance contribution…
Need Satisfaction and Welfare Outcomes: Theory and Explanations
Marx’s Theory of Productive and Unproductive Labour
This essay will attempt, first and foremost, a definitive exposition of Marx’s theory of productive and unproductive labour. This theory is presented in the three volumes of Capital and in Theories of Surplus Value—Marx’s projected historico-critical fourth volume. This seems useful and necessary for several reasons. First, as
Meeting housing needs within planetary boundaries: A UK case study
O direito à satisfação das necessidades
Este artigo desenvolve uma estratégia argumentativa para justificar uma moralidade de satisfação das necessidades humanas. Se esperamos seriamente que outros assumam os deveres e responsabilidades morais que lhes atribuímos, então temos que provê-los dos recursos e das oportunidades necessários para tanto. Os autores avaliam a validade e o alcance desse argumento, tanto em um contexto intracultural quanto em um contexto intercultural
Poverty and Health–A Review Article
Aspirations of aboriginal children
Marx’s Theory of Productive and Unproductive Labour
This essay will attempt, first and foremost, a definitive exposition of Marx’s theory of productive and unproductive labour. This theory is presented in the three volumes of Capital and in Theories of Surplus Value—Marx’s projected historico-critical fourth volume. This seems useful and necessary for several reasons. First, as
Variations in Services for the Aged
State Expenditure in Advanced Capitalism
The current stage of ‘neo-capitalism’ or ‘state monopoly capitalism’ is characterized by a qualitatively expanded role of the state in capitalist social formations. One expression of this huge politico-economic weight of the modern state is the prolonged expansion in state expenditures, such that they now exceed one half
Theories of the Welfare State: A Critique
The article considers three major non-Marxist explanations of the modern welfare state: functionalist sociological theories, economic theories of government policy, and pluralist theories of democracy. Each is subjected to a critique and all are found wanting, in that none can satisfactorily explain the observable similarities and differences in state welfare intervention within advanced capitalist countries. Functionalist theories can explain th…
The Political Economy of the Welfare State
This advanced text focuses on a set of key themes and issues of particular relevance and topicality in understanding contemporary Chinese politics, economy and society. Following an overview of the hi
Political Economy of the Welfare State
The Origins of the Welfare State
To disentangle the origins and functions of welfare policies let us begin with Marx's own study of the British Factory Acts in the nineteenth century.1 He demonstrated how the Ten Hours Act and other factory legislation was the result of unremitting struggle by the working class against their exploitation, yet ultimately served the longer-term interests of capital by preventing the over-exploitation and exhaustion of the labour force. The short-t…
The Political Economy of the Welfare State
A theory of human needs
The Inevitability of Human Needs
The coherence of the concept of social progress depends upon the belief that some modes of social organisation are better suited to satisfying human need than others. Unless increases in need-satisfaction can be shown to follow from policies which purport to promote such progress their moral purpose will be blurred. This can be seen as regards the varied attempts to defend and improve the welfare state. In light of national differences between we…
Who Needs Human Needs?
Abuses of the concept of objective and universal human need have led to disillusionment and scepticism. This has contributed to the collapse of confidence in the prospect of successful socialist politics, the threat to welfare citizenship rights, the fragmentation of political struggle against varied forms of oppression, and, gaining strength from all of this, the intellectual influence of the New Right. Many argue that it is morally safer and in…
A Dual Political Strategy
Just as the economic organisation of a society which accords a high priority to optimising need-satisfaction must consist of a duality, so too must its political organisation. If human needs have strict priority over other political goals, then all people have the right to optimal need-satisfaction based on the best available knowledge. Such a view might seem to support the authority of experts. However, we have seen that appropriate and effectiv…
Physical Health and Autonomy: The Basic Needs of Persons
Attempts to deny the objectivity of need have proved popular and superficially plausible. People do have strong feelings about what they need and these feelings can vary enormously between cultures and over time. In Britain, for example, Townsend found that as many as 44 per cent of those he defined as severely deprived felt no deprivation themselves (1979a, p. 423). Yet there also appears to be a consensus about the range of necessities which fo…
Human Liberation and the Right to Need-Satisfaction
So far we have argued that health and autonomy are basic needs common to all humans irrespective of culture. We have further shown that there are specific societal conditions for the satisfaction of both needs. But we have not been concerned with the moral issue of whether people’s needs should be met. Not everyone accepts that they have an obligation to aid those in serious need. Without such a moral theory we can only preach to the converted. T…
Measuring Need-Satisfaction
In Part II we have argued that basic needs exist which are objective and universal but our understanding of which changes, and typically expands, through time. We also recognised that these needs are met by innumerable specific satisfiers, which do vary across cultures. Here, we must again address the many problems which flow from this duality of universality and particularity. Can we articulate what physical health and autonomy mean in terms whi…
Optimising Need-Satisfaction in Theory
Even if we assume that there is general agreement within a society that priority should be given to the optimisation of need satisfaction, we are not yet out of the relativist wood. There may be little consensus over which strategies best achieve this goal and/or, whether or not it can be reconciled with other aims and beliefs. Human history has created so many different patterns of production, reproduction, communication and government that view…
Towards a Political Economy of Need-Satisfaction
Chapter 12 provides a description of need-satisfaction in the contemporary world: it does not explain what we observe. Such findings raise questions for each of the Three Worlds’. What, if any, is the contribution of economic growth, as conventionally defined and measured, to the level and distribution of need-satisfaction? What other political and social institutions and processes are at work? Why have the more developed state socialist societie…
Physical Health and Autonomy
How can the satisfaction of basic needs be empirically evaluated? The reader will recall the distinction drawn in Chapter 4 between the ultimate goal presumed by our theory — the avoidance of serious harm regarded as the fundamental and sustained impairment of social participation — and the basic needs for physical health and autonomy. These needs were seen to be the universal conditions for achieving this goal. Our intention here is to operation…
Charting Human Welfare: Need-Satisfaction in the Three Worlds
Beliefs about the benign or malign effects of modernisation on human welfare seem to go in swings. The nineteenth-century trust in social progress was severely undermined by First World War, the interwar crisis of capitalism, the emergence of fascism and Stalinism and the horror of Auschwitz. Yet for a period after the Second World War the belief in a rational path of progress revived, as both welfare capitalism and state socialism held out the p…
The Grammar of ‘Need’
It is at least plausible to assume that objective human needs exist in some sense. Yet there can be no doubt that our common-sense understanding of what sorts of things needs are is varied and often confused and ambiguous. This is due in part to the fact that the word ‘need’ is employed in everyday language in such diverse ways. One of the most common usages refers to needs as drives with which we have little choice but to conform. Another concep…
Societal Preconditions for Optimising Need-Satisfaction
In Chapters 6 and 7, we argued that everyone has a moral right to optimal need-satisfaction. We now need to consider how this moral right translates into specific positive rights — how rights to need-satisfaction can be specified and delivered, and how our procedural preconditions for rational deliberation can be approximated in real-world political processes and institutions. Only then can we evaluate how closely different societies approximate …
Societal Preconditions for the Satisfaction of Basic Needs
Has our emphasis on personal autonomy smuggled in a strong form of individualism which denies the role of the social and its place in meeting needs? The answer we give in this chapter is no — we can only acquire the ability to act from the positive actions of others and they from others and so on. Any conception of agency or autonomy which ignores this fact will be an impoverished abstraction, irrelevant to understanding why humans act and choose…
Intermediate Needs
In Chapter 8 we introduced the notion of ‘universal satisfier characteristics’: those ‘inputs’ which, according to the best available knowledge, contribute positively to the ‘output’ of individual health and autonomy in all cultures. We identified eleven such characteristics, which we called ‘intermediate needs’. In this chapter, we shall elaborate on each of these, trying to do two things. First, its inclusion will be justified by referring to t…
Political science (53 works) · Economics (47 works) · Law (34 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Politics (30 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (29 works) · Welfare (24 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Economic system (19 works) · Market economy (17 works)