Growth as Adaptation:
Ecowelfare and the Reproduction of Climate Crisis

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.

I call the object of this inquiry ecowelfare: the overlapping domain of welfare and environmental governance through which states use social provision to manage climate risk and sustain social order. At its center is a dialectic of adaptation—states meet ecological crisis through a contradictory mix of care and repair that can temporarily decommodify life even as it folds recovery back into accumulation.

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.

The three studies follow a single arc: what states say about adaptation, what states build as ecowelfare institutions, and what those designs do under crisis.

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 comparative symptomatic reading across an adaptation-planning corpus of 203 societies and 487 documents—among the most complete global collections of national and regional adaptation plans assembled to date.

Findings: Adaptation is framed predominantly as resilience-as-continuity—protecting productivity, fiscal stability, and market competitiveness—with rural livelihoods, governance, and finance dominating the discursive field. Care and ecosocial protection appear rhetorically but are marginalized instrumentally. The exclusions are patterned, not idiosyncratic: the archive encodes a global hierarchy of whose adaptation counts.

2. Ecowelfare State Typology (Global Regimes of Ecodecommodification)

Question: How do countries vary in how they integrate ecological governance and social protection?

Approach: An SDG-indicator architecture for ecodecommodification (PCA-based indices) with model-based clustering (Gaussian mixture models) to identify ecowelfare regime types.

Findings: The first global ecowelfare typology grounded in structural indicators of ecodecommodification and adaptive policy logics. The resulting six-cluster typology is organized along two axes: an ecodecommodification gradient that tracks the global development hierarchy, and a discursive productivism axis. Labor and land decommodification emerge as co-constituted rather than separate domains—linking 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 and difference-in-differences on a state panel (1980–2022), estimating dynamic treatment effects of major hurricanes and the moderating role of Disaster Unemployment Assistance and FEMA/NFIP-style ecowelfare programs.

Preliminary findings: A causal test of growth-as-adaptation. Results to date point toward a precisely estimated near-null on growth—the post-disaster stimulus is real, but it does not appear to be routed through a separable ecowelfare layer whose pre-existing capacity distinguishes among states. Recovery neither reliably rebuilds nor transforms, leaving the dialectic of adaptation unresolved in practice. (Analysis in progress; results subject to revision.)

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 and climate justice, and post-/degrowth theory—using theory to specify mechanisms (eco(de/re)commodification) that the empirical chapters then operationalize and test.

Methodologically, the project pairs causal inference and computational social science with critical theory: rigorous enough to inform policy design, and sharp enough to ask what our categories, data systems, and administrative rules are built to see—and whom they leave out.

Related Publications

Work developing the ecowelfare framework has appeared in:

• Brown, C. T., & Chang, Y. L. (2026). Ecosocial policy and the social risks of climate change: Foundations of the US ecosocial safety net. Journal of Social Policy, 55(2), 522–541. doi:10.1017/S0047279424000126
• Brown, C. T., & Chang, Y. L. (2025). Hotspots of inequity in climate adaptation: Explaining the stratification of U.S. ecowelfare using space-time and machine learning analysis. Climate, 13(12), 244. doi:10.3390/cli13120244
• Brown, C. T. (2025). Contradictions of the ecowelfare state: The state, the human, and nature. Capitalism Nature Socialism. doi:10.1080/10455752.2025.2587871
• Brown, C. T. (2025). Ecosocial adaptation and the care professions: A systems-ecological approach to climate risk. Social Work in Public Health. doi:10.1080/19371918.2025.2554664
• Brown, C. T. (2026). Social inclusion, welfare states, and ecosocial adaptation: A global analysis. Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy. doi:10.1017/ics.2026.10090

Extending the Project

Two lines of work carry the dissertation forward:

• Statecraft — a computational policy tool I am building that scrapes, classifies, and summarizes legislation and administrative policy across every level of U.S. government using open large language models, turning a diffuse policy landscape into an analyzable corpus.
• U.S. state adaptation plans — extending the dissertation’s national-plan analysis downward to all fifty states, using Statecraft to test how states route climate risk through social protection versus infrastructure-and-insurance logics.

Status

Ph.D. in Social Welfare, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley. Dissertation in progress; expected Spring 2027.

Committee: Yu-Ling Chang and Neil Gilbert (School of Social Welfare); Sharad Chari (Geography and Critical Theory).

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