Citation: Nordensvärd, J.; Ketola, M.; Urban, F. The River Runs Through It: Naturalising Social Policy and Welfare. Sustainability 2022, 14, 10415. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su141610415 Academic Editor: Katarzyna Pawlewicz Received: 7 July 2022 Accepted: 15 August 2022 Published: 22 August 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). sustainability Article The River Runs Through It: Naturalising Social Policy and Welfare Johan Nordensvärd 1, * , Markus Ketola 2 and Frauke Urban 3 1 Department of Management and Engineering (IEI), Linköping University, 581 83 Linköping, Sweden 2 School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, UK 3 Department of Industrial Economics and Management (INDEK), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden * Correspondence: johan.nordensvard@liu.se; Tel.: +46-13-281025 Abstract: This paper reconceptualises social rights through an integration of human welfare and environmental welfare. This is essential if we are making a case for the radical policy changes required to respond to the current environmental crisis, such as maximum living standards and maximum income. As living standards and the demand for social rights increase across the world, this will lead to a concomitant pressure on nature. A maximum living standard based on an ecological footprint is a starting point to think about the need to grant legal rights and resources to nature. Following Polanyi, both humans and the environment are fictitious commodities; we therefore need to rethink our approach to social policy and decommodification to include the environment. This requires approaching social rights from an ecological perspective and breaking the anthropocentric barriers welfare policies create between society and nature. Here, we draw on the work of Michel Serres on ‘the natural contract’ in order to rethink the content of the social contract and develop an argument in favour of decommodifying nature. Using rivers as legal entities in New Zealand as our example, we illustrate how this theoretical approach could provide the foundations for sustainable eco-social policies in general and maximum living standards in particular. Keywords: social policy; nature rights; environmental policy; decommodification; indigenous knowledge; welfare 1. Introduction In this paper, we aim to make the case for a maximum living standard by rethinking the division between human and environmental welfare. We are motivated by the possibilities of extending the use of social policy concepts and practices to engage more directly with the relationship between human society and the environment. Environmental problems, such as climate change, nature resource depletion, pollution, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, and water scarcity, are the consequences of industrial development over the last two centuries. This same industrial development has also been the cornerstone of the modern welfare state. Moreover, the consumption patterns of the wealthy, developed countries were recognised as an important factor in environmental degradation as early as the Rio Summit of 1992 [1]. This pattern and the urgent need to reduce the consumption of natural resources were reinforced at the Rio + 20 Summit in 2012 and the Stockholm Summit in 2022, along with the acknowledgement that many emerging economies, such as China, India, South Africa, Mexico, and Brazil, were joining the group of middle-income countries [2]. These concerns of overconsumption and the urgent need to consider them in the context of social policy have also been recognised by the United Nations through its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We are presented with the twin challenge of wealthy countries consuming far too much of the natural resources while at the same time outsourcing the environmental impact of this consumption to the low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) responsible for the Sustainability 2022, 14, 10415. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141610415 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability