Research
I study how climate risk is reorganizing social protection—and how adaptation governance can either reproduce growth-dependent political economies or open space for ecosocial alternatives. My work bridges social welfare, critical theory, and climate policy using mixed methods to map institutions, outcomes, and ideas across the Global North and South.
Dissertation: Growth as Adaptation
My dissertation develops the concept of ecowelfare—the integration of climate adaptation in welfare states. I argue that crisis governance often cycles repair back into markets through growth-as-adaptation: temporary decommodification of labor and land during disasters, followed by recommodification in recovery. At its center is a dialectic of adaptation, tested across three studies: what states say about adaptation, what states build as ecowelfare institutions, and what those designs do under crisis.
Research Streams
1. Ecowelfare States & Climate Adaptation
Guiding question: How do states integrate climate adaptation with social protection?
I build comparative frameworks for identifying ecowelfare institutions and their distributional logics, including cross-national typologies and analyses of how welfare capacity shapes climate governance.
Key projects:
- Global ecowelfare typology built on indicators of ecodecommodification
- Comparative analysis of National Adaptation Plans
- Climate risk and welfare-state transformation
- Comparative energy and utility assistance regimes
Methods/data: Model-based clustering; comparative political economy; indicator construction; text-as-data
2. Disasters, Recovery, and the Political Economy of Growth
Guiding question: What does the welfare state do to growth imperatives after disasters?
Using U.S. disasters as a strategic case, I examine how relief and recovery policies shape economic trajectories—and how decommodification during crisis is often reversed during rebuilding.
Key projects:
- Welfare and recovery trajectories after major hurricanes
- Inequity in the U.S. ecosocial safety net
- The divided ecowelfare state: the political economy of public–private disaster relief
- Growth-as-adaptation in disaster recovery
Methods/data: DiD; generalized synthetic control; panel econometrics; network analysis; administrative data
3. Adaptation Governance, Ideas, and Computational Policy Analysis
Guiding question: What ideologies organize adaptation policy “common sense”—and how can we study policy at scale?
I analyze how states narrate adaptation—what gets centered (resilience, markets, infrastructure) and what gets displaced (care, redistribution, enforceable protection)—and how those frames shape policy design. This stream pairs large-scale computational text analysis with critical reading for what policy documents leave unsaid.
Key projects:
- Computational and symptomatic reading of the global NAP corpus
- U.S. state adaptation and hazard-mitigation plans
- Mitigation–adaptation sequencing and institutional path dependence
- Political economy of adaptation planning
Methods/data: NLP; topic modeling and embeddings; computational discourse analysis; critical policy analysis
4. Ecosocial Policy, Practice, and Translation
Guiding question: How can adaptation meet needs without defaulting to growth-as-repair?
Through applied and collaborative work, I translate ecosocial concepts into practical frameworks for just adaptation, emphasizing redistribution, care, and institutional design.
Key projects:
- Theory of ecosocial adaptation
- The Ecosocial Commons
- Community climate education and organizing collaborations
- Ecosocial implementation frameworks for agencies and NGOs
- Practitioner perspectives on disaster assistance reform
Approach/methods: Participatory action research; policy co-design; practitioner-facing synthesis
5. Critical Ecosocial Theory
Guiding question: What kind of state is being built through adaptation—and what contradictions does it manage?
I develop a critical theory of the ecowelfare state and adaptation governance, drawing on critical state theory, eco-Marxism, and social reproduction to explain how legitimacy, accumulation, and care are reorganized under climate risk.
Key projects/concepts:
- Ecowelfare; the ecosocial safety net
- The dialectic of adaptation; eco(de/re)commodification and the welfare/ecology nexus
- Adaptation imaginary; growth-centered resilience
- Technocare and the apparatus of climate governance
Primary traditions: Critical political economy; Frankfurt School/state theory; social reproduction; post-/degrowth; environmental and climate justice
Research Infrastructure
Two platforms extend this scholarship into durable research infrastructure.
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. Statecraft turns a diffuse, multi-jurisdictional policy landscape into a structured, analyzable corpus—infrastructure for studying policy at scale, with a replicable and auditable method.
The Ecosocial Commons — a national community-based nonprofit I founded to bridge frontline knowledge and policy expertise through participatory research, policy education, and nonpartisan convening, ensuring findings reach the communities and decision-makers they concern.
Selected Publications
- 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
- Brown, C. T., & Ben Brik, A. (2025). Welfare regime typologies: The six worlds of social inclusion. Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy. doi:10.1017/ics.2024.14
- Gounder, B., & Brown, C. T. (2024). Limitations of ecomodernist climate change mitigation: The case of the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and the (un)just transition. Critical Social Policy, 45(1). doi:10.1177/02610183241281349
- Brown, C. T., & Gilbert, N. (2024). Comparative social policy. Encyclopedia of Social Work. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199975839.013.879
Collaboration
I welcome collaborations on ecowelfare institutions, adaptation governance, disaster recovery political economy, computational policy analysis, and post-growth ecosocial policy design.
Contact: ct.brown@berkeley.edu