Debates about sustainable welfare and eco-social policy cut across many fields, from environmental studies to political economy, to normative political theory, to comparative welfare state research, to active labour market policy, to income support and social protection. The key debates engaged with in this thematic section concern the relationship between eco-social policy and normative theories of wellbeing (human needs theory, capabilities approach), and the implications of such understandings of sustainable wellbeing for the provision of benefits and services. Also at issue, particularly in the latter contributions, is the intersection between eco-social policy and post-productivist theories of ‘work’, and what this entails for active labour market policy and the conditionality of income supports. This brings in a much larger debate about reconfiguring income supports, and the differences between universal basic income (UBI), a minimum income guarantee (Coote, this themed section), or a participation income (Laruffa et al., this themed section). The literature on UBI is vast, so only recent work articulating the relationship between UBI and the transition towards a more eco-socially sustainable welfare state has been included. The literatures on human needs theory and the capabilities approach are similarly extensive. Hence, only foundational work in those fields has been included, along with subsequent contributions that have applied those theories to issues of eco-social concern.