Paper short abstract:

This paper explores an ongoing welfare experiment in Switzerland, where an Ecological Transition Income is offered to last-resort welfare recipients who can convincingly show they contribute to the ecological transition. The analysis is based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in an innovation hub.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores an ongoing welfare experiment in Switzerland: the 'Ecological Transition Income' (ETI). As an offshoot of the idea of a universal basic income, the experiment consists of citizens receiving income provided they convincingly commit to what becomes routinely invoked across Europe: 'the ecological transition'. This ETI is currently tested on a small cohort as a replacement of the 'insertion income', the last-resort welfare assistance in Switzerland's third largest canton. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on the design and implementation of this multi-million experiment, I dive into the backstage of a third sector renegotiating the social contract in a country that seeks to become a global leader in spearheading this ecological transition. By attending not only to the ‘innovators’ behind these welfare experiments but also to the individuals targeted and their experience, I ask what might be falling apart, in their view, as they strive to innovate and to labour as productive citizens. Furthermore, I consider what appears to fall apart from an ethnographic point of view in the backdrop of recent anthropological conversations on the transformation of European welfare states. To these debates, I suggest a complementary analytical angle exploring how the idea of an ‘ecological transition’ insinuates itself into welfare states’ transformation. This analysis is part of an ongoing ethnography of welfare experiments unfolding within an entrepreneurial hub in a major Swiss city, where ideals of innovation and entrepreneurship are mobilized to create new ways of governing productive citizenship in the era of environmental and ecological crises.