Universal basic services and social protection

This pillar establishes the material and institutional foundations of a human rights economy by ensuring that no one is left without the essential conditions for a dignified life.

It advances an integrated approach combining Universal Basic Services (UBS) and universal social protection to guarantee secure access to healthcare, education, housing, food, water and sanitation, clean energy, mobility and digital connectivity, alongside adequate income support across the life course. By strengthening both in-kind provisioning and income security, the pillar reduces poverty and inequality directly, delinks basic needs from volatile markets and precarious employment, and builds resilience to economic, health and climate-related shocks.

The pillar responds to two structural realities. First, growth-dependent strategies have proven increasingly unreliable in preventing deprivation, as basic needs remain unaffordable or inaccessible even in contexts of economic expansion. Second, the commodification and financialisation of essential services have exposed households to price volatility, exclusion and debt, deepening inequality and undermining social cohesion. The Roadmap therefore frames essential services and social security as legal entitlements grounded in human rights, to be delivered through universal systems that prioritise adequacy, accessibility, non-discrimination and accountability.

Policies under this pillar are organised around two mutually reinforcing clusters. The first focuses on Universal Basic Services, advancing measures to expand and improve public and publicly regulated provisioning systems in core sectors: education; nutritious food; universal health coverage (including mental health); adequate housing; water, sanitation and hygiene; clean and sufficient energy; affordable and accessible public transport; and universal digital connectivity. Across these areas, the emphasis is on universality rather than narrow targeting, the decommodification of core services, and governance arrangements that enable transparency, democratic participation and—where appropriate—local co-production, while safeguarding quality and equity.

The second cluster focuses on universal social protection, recognising that income security remains indispensable, particularly in contexts of informality, economic volatility and rapid ecological and technological change. It advances proposals to build social-ecological security systems capable of anticipating and responding to shocks, including climate-related disruptions and transition risks; to establish minimum income guarantees that are rights-based and designed to prevent non-take-up and exclusion; to strengthen life-course protection through universal child benefits; and to assess the role of universal basic income as part of a broader architecture that supports dignity, autonomy and resilience. In this approach, cash support complements—but does not replace—universal services; together, they form an integrated system that guarantees essential needs while enabling people to participate in care, community life, education and socially useful work.

Finally, the pillar addresses a central enabling question: how to finance sustainable welfare in a context of ecological constraints and lower growth. It highlights strategies to reduce avoidable welfare demand through preventative investment (including in health, education, care and resilient infrastructure), to diversify revenue sources toward progressive and ecological taxation, to redirect public spending away from harmful subsidies, and—where appropriate—to use disciplined monetary-fiscal coordination to expand fiscal space for essential social and ecological investment. By combining universal services with robust income guarantees and sustainable financing strategies, this pillar anchors poverty eradication in secure entitlements and collective provisioning, rather than in the uncertain promise of trickle-down growth.

Universal basic services 

Universal Basic Services (UBS) guarantee an unconditional material and social foundation below which no one should fall, by ensuring universal access to essential services such as healthcare, education, housing, water, sanitation, energy, transport and communication. UBS addresses two structural challenges: protecting the most vulnerable through secure access to decent living standards and social connection, and reorienting production and consumption toward meeting basic human needs within ecological limits. Grounded in human rights commitments and the concept of “decent living standards,” UBS shifts the focus of economic policy from income growth to the direct satisfaction of fundamental needs through collectively provided services.

UBS can be delivered through a mix of direct public provision (e.g. health and education systems), regulation-driven models (e.g. lifeline tariffs for energy and water), and hybrid approaches combining public funding with local co-production. Financing relies primarily on progressive taxation and sector-specific redistribution, with high users cross-subsidising essential consumption. Design principles include universality rather than targeting, democratic governance and co-production, transparency and accountability, and subsidiarity in decision-making. UBS can complement cash transfers where appropriate, but differs in that it decommodifies core services, shielding households from price volatility and reducing dependence on market income to secure basic needs.

Evidence shows that access to strong public services is more closely associated with well-being outcomes than GDP growth alone, and that countries with effective provisioning systems can achieve high levels of need satisfaction at comparatively low levels of resource and energy use. By providing a “virtual income” in kind, UBS reduces poverty and inequality, strengthens economic resilience during shocks, and enables labour and sectoral transitions without exposing people to destitution. At the same time, by prioritising collective and sustainable modes of provision, it supports a shift toward sufficiency-oriented, low-impact consumption patterns compatible with planetary boundaries.

Welfare states were historically constructed in periods of sustained economic expansion and high employment, which allowed labour and consumption taxes to grow alongside GDP. As a result, social protection systems became structurally tied to growth-dependent revenue streams. Yet welfare systems do not inherently require continuous GDP expansion to remain viable. The “growth dependency” of welfare financing stems from an imbalance between the supply of social funding (largely tied to wages, profits and consumption) and rising demand for social spending driven by ageing, inequality, unemployment, and ecological breakdown. Financing sustainable welfare beyond growth therefore requires a structural strategy that simultaneously reduces avoidable welfare demand and restructures funding mechanisms so they are less reliant on expanding output.

A first pillar of this strategy is preventative and pre-distributive reform to stabilise or reduce long-term welfare demand. Universal public services, preventive healthcare, early childhood education, working-time reduction, job guarantees, climate mitigation and adaptation, and strong equality policies all reduce downstream social costs linked to unemployment, ill-health, poverty and environmental damage. Evidence shows that more equal societies experience better health, educational outcomes and lower social harm, thereby reducing long-term fiscal pressure. By shifting from ex post compensation to ex ante prevention and pre-distribution, welfare systems become less expensive to sustain and less politically dependent on growth as a fiscal buffer.

A second pillar restructures welfare financing itself. This involves strengthening progressive taxation, expanding taxes on wealth and luxury consumption, reinforcing corporate and environmental taxation, and increasing the eco-social intensity of public budgets by redirecting resources away from harmful subsidies and excessive defence or supply-side spending. Because wealth taxes fall on stocks rather than flows, they are less directly dependent on annual growth rates. Complementary measures include decommodifying core welfare services — particularly health and pensions — to reduce cost inflation linked to financialisation. However, fiscal reform alone is insufficient: as tax bases remain partly tied to economic activity, additional instruments are required to secure stable welfare funding in a context of lower material throughput.

A third pillar therefore centres on monetary-fiscal coordination and democratised money creation. Purposeful public money creation — carefully governed, legally bounded, and aligned with price stability — can finance universal services, care systems, and job guarantees that are not profit-generating and therefore cannot rely on commercial bank lending. When combined with credit guidance and green monetary policy to redirect private finance away from destructive activities and toward socially necessary investment, this approach expands fiscal space without requiring perpetual GDP growth. To safeguard stability, net money creation must be aligned with real resource capacity and accompanied by measures that scale down resource-intensive production, preventing inflationary pressures.

Taken together, these pillars outline a coherent strategy for financing sustainable welfare beyond growth: reduce structural drivers of welfare demand; reform and diversify fiscal revenues toward progressive, stock-based and ecological sources; reallocate public spending toward social priorities; and complement taxation with disciplined public monetary financing. Under this framework, welfare systems need not collapse in the absence of growth. Instead, they can be stabilised and strengthened through deliberate institutional redesign that aligns social protection with planetary boundaries and democratic control over economic resources.

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