Professor Ian Gough FBA

Summary

Ian Gough is a British political economist, political theorist, social policy analyst and pioneer of need theory and ‘eco-social policy’.

Son of a plumber turned publican and educated at Hitchin Boys Grammar School, Gough studied Economics at Cambridge 1961-64. He has since led in social policy departments at Manchester and Bath universities, with a year as professor of economics at Berkeley. Elected an early fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, he served on its Counci; since 2009 he has been Visiting Professor at the LSE’s Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion.

Gough created an influential body of work covering three distinct areas of scholarship. In 1979 he pubished The Political Economy of the Welfare State, recognised as ‘a classic text in social policy’ and co-founded the journal Critical Social Policy. In 1991 he co-authored (with Len Doyal) A Theory of Human Need, constructing a normative concept of universal and objective human needs for evaluating human wellbeing in different economic systems. It won the Isaac Deutscher and Gunnar Myrdal prizes, and formed a central plank of the ESRC-funded Wellbeing in Developing Countries research group at Bath.

From 2007 Gough has focused on the accelerating climate crisis and its implications for wellbeing and social policy. He initiated the study of ‘eco-social policy’ which directly links responsibility for the heating planet with inequalities in consumption. He introduced policy concepts to distinguish necessities from luxuries and outlined features of a ‘sufficiency’ economy. These ideas were first brought together in Heat, Greed and Human Need, published in 2017. They have since influenced the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in its 2022 Sixth Assessment Report. Gough has developed this body of work over 50 years in more than 40 countries, including the World Bank, European Union, ILO, ETUI, Royal Society and the Potsdam Institute.