Contradictions of the ecowelfare state: The state, the human, and nature

This paper theorizes ecowelfare as the arena in which the capitalist state governs co-produced crises of climate change and inequality by adding a third regulatory imperative—ecoregulation—to accumulation and legitimation. Read through metabolic rift and world-ecology, ecoregulation is the ongoing (re)composition of human–nature relations via discursive, administrative, and material techniques—eco(de/re)commodification. Deployed heuristically, this lens surfaces three recurrent contradictions: legitimation, as programs stabilize human/nature binaries even as lived experience erodes them; accumulation, as carbonized, commodified need-satisfaction forecloses sufficiency; and scale/time, as national policies mismatch planetary dynamics. U.S. cases—FEMA’s Individual Assistance Program and the National Flood Insurance Program—show how eligibility, mapping, and pricing humanize and exclude. The paper proposes evaluative criteria and sketches ecosocial designs that reorient crisis governance.

Recommended citation: Brown, C. T. (2025). Contradictions of the ecowelfare state: The state, the human, and nature. Capitalism Nature Socialism. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2025.2587871.
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