Cash – Human rights and social sustainability in the transition to a cashless society

This project investigates aspects of the transition towards a cashless society, with an empirical focus on Sweden. There are strong and obvious benefits to – and support for – the global trend towards cashlessness. However, as pointed out by the UN Committee for Development Policy and noted in the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG1), technology can create exclusion and inequality, or acerbate existing ones. Social sustainability requires inclusive technologies. This in its turn requires understanding and knowledge of how digital exclusion works in affected people’s lives, what their experiences are, and what measures would help them. This project approaches cashlessness as a question of social justice and inclusion. Through an interview study focusing on groups identified in existing research as vulnerable to digital exclusion, the project seeks to develop a human rights-based normative framework to guide decision-makers towards fair, inclusive and socially sustainable policies. The experiences of the transition towards cashlessness expressed by the interviewees are treated as theory and policy relevant sources of knowledge. The project team will work together with interviewees, stakeholders, and the project’s reference group in a process of co-learning, using a bottom-up approach to normative theory.

The project investigates the transition towards a cashless economy in Sweden. We combine a an approach to human rights and social sustainability with an empirical interview study with people adversely affected by this change, people who for various socioeconomic reasons are cash dependent in some way.

We do not dispute the convenience and security of digital payments. Our concern is with consequences of exclusion for socially vulnerable groups when this transition takes place without sufficient attention to how the change affects them and how they experience it.

Our approach to human rights is political rather than strictly ethical or simply legal. Human rights refer to social and political practices (law, policy, and social norms) that together secure objects of value, rather than to the values directly. Adding a sustainability component, we conceptualise this as a sustainable infrastructure of justice.

We proceed from real life inequalities and experiences of exclusion and collect empirical material through an interview study. We are interested in how different kinds of disadvantages affect the interviewees’ practical lives as well as their self-images and their sense of belonging. Identifying interviewees, we have gone via organizations and groups that represent and provide service and support for people who are potentially cash dependent. We use the social indicators that already existing research find to be relevant for digital exclusion: low economic status, disability, age, migration status, and gender.

So: Theoretically we are interested in combining a human rights-based approach to policy decisions and change with social sustainability, which adds a component of social vulnerability and risk over time.

Our normative commitments and observations.
• A human right to something includes a right to whatever is socially required for the secure enjoyment of that something.
• Consequences for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups have a moral priority
• People whose situation makes them vulnerability to rights violations is a politically relevant concern.

Normatively relevant observations that need to be studied empirically
• Any object of a rights has social determinants (a concept widely used in welfare research).
• Social disadvantages tend to cluster, so one social disadvantage is reinforced by another. Some disadvantages are particularly “corrosive” in this sense (Wolff and de-Shalit 2013)
• Social injustice is reinforced by epistemic injustice – where a person is not trusted or not believed to possess relevant knowledge because of her identity or social position

“Dimensions of rights vulnerability”
the probability of someone experiencing rights loss
persons’ control over their situation
their level of resilience in the event of a setback
how they are affected by social attitudes and norms
their epistemic status.