When Helping Hurts argues that modern welfare systems don't just manage social risk—they also function as climate adaptation infrastructure ("ecowelfare"), and under crisis governance they often cycle repair back into markets through growth-as-adaptation: temporary eco(de)commodification during disaster, followed by recommodification in recovery.
Core Claim
Climate adaptation is increasingly embedded in existing welfare institutions—less as transformation than as crisis management that stabilizes populations and restores market participation. This produces a paradox: as climate risk intensifies, welfare-based adaptation can become more necessary and more likely to reinforce the growth logics that help drive ecological crisis.
What the Dissertation Does
A book-length dissertation that develops a critical theory of ecowelfare and tests it empirically across global and U.S. contexts—linking adaptation governance, social protection, and growth.
Empirical Studies (Across Scales)
1. Global Climate Adaptation Ideologies (National Adaptation Plans)
Question: What policy logics organize “adaptation,” and what gets systematically sidelined?
Approach: Computational text analysis (topic modeling + embeddings) combined with symptomatic reading across an adaptation-planning corpus covering 209 countries/territories.
Payoff: A classificatory map of adaptation logics—especially where growth-centered “resilience” displaces decommodified care.
2. Ecowelfare State Typology (Global Regimes of Eco(de)commodification)
Question: How do countries vary in how they integrate ecological governance and social protection?
Approach: Build an SDG-indicator architecture for eco(de)commodification (PCA-based indices) and use model-based clustering (Gaussian mixture models) to identify ecowelfare types.
Payoff: A comparative regime framework that links welfare capacity and ecological governance to vulnerability, adaptive capacity, and emissions.
3. Ecowelfare and Post-Disaster Growth (United States)
Question: After major hurricanes, do expansions in U.S. climate-adapted welfare and ecowelfare programs causally increase (or reshape) growth trajectories?
Approach: Generalized synthetic control DiD to estimate dynamic treatment effects of hurricanes and the moderating role of Disaster-UI and FEMA/NFIP-style ecowelfare.
Payoff: A causal test of growth-as-adaptation—when welfare dampens growth pressure, when it amplifies recommodification, and under what institutional conditions.
Theoretical Framework
This dissertation is explicitly theory-driven: it builds a critical account of how states govern climate crisis through welfare institutions—linking adaptation to accumulation, legitimation, and ecoregulation as core functions of the ecowelfare state.
It synthesizes: critical political economy, welfare state theory, social reproduction theory, environmental justice, and post-/degrowth theory—using theory to specify mechanisms (eco(de/re)commodification) that the empirical chapters then operationalize and test.
Status
PhD in Social Welfare (UC Berkeley), dissertation in progress; expected completion 2027.
Contact
Interested in collaboration, talks, or related projects on ecowelfare, climate adaptation, and post-growth social policy?