‘Building back better’? Adaptive social protection and futures of protracted crisis

Abstract

During the Covid crisis, while countries set up an unprecedented social protection response, international organisations quickly turned towards envisioning how to ‘build back better’ using social protection. Building on a qualitative document analysis, the article finds that international organisations frequently imagine the future through anticipations of protracted and multidimensional crises – often in quantified form. Arguing that futures are an ideational influence on policymaking, the article reconstructs two ways in which these crisis anticipations inform international organisations’ social protection policy proposals: first, as legitimising narratives for expanding social protection; second, in the form of policy proposals that embed crisis anticipation in their design, as in the case of ‘adaptive social protection’. The article shows that adaptive social protection departs from traditional social protection policy: it promotes strengthening individual, household and systemic resilience, and implementing preparedness as a governing rationale, thus moving from a focus on compensation and provision towards prevention.

Keywords

crisis futures preparedness quantification resilience social protection

Introduction

After the Covid pandemic hit the world in early 2020, countries worldwide responded with an unprecedented introduction of new and expansion of existing social protection policies,¹ both aiming at mitigating the actual health crisis and alleviating the social and economic hardships induced by the containment measures, including lockdowns. ‘As of January 2022, a total of 3,856 social protection and labor measures were planned or implemented by 223 economies’ (Gentilini et al., 2022: 5). Social protection and labour ‘expenditures represent around 18% of overall stimulus packages’, which ‘is about 4.5 times higher than the estimated level of social protection spending during the Great Recession of 2008-09’ (Gentilini et al., 2022: 7). While most social protection policies implemented or expanded were temporary (Leisering, 2021) and while the response was highly unequal in terms of the North-South divide (Cantillon et al., 2021; Devereux, 2021), this observation nonetheless exemplifies the enormous popularity of social protection as a crisis management tool, even more so than in earlier instances, such as during the global financial and economic crisis of the late 2000s (Barrientos, 2011; Vis et al., 2011). Just like then, frequently the question comes up whether the crisis is accompanied by a transformation of social protection, or rather a quick ‘return to normal’ or even retrenchment (Béland et al., 2021a; Hill, 2011). According to established perspectives in the public policy literature, which investigate how crises and policy change hang together, the uncertainty surrounding crises can indeed lead to paradigmatic policy shifts (Blyth, 2002; Hall, 1993) – but it does not do so necessarily, and crises might just be a legitimising factor for policy changes that have already been planned for a long time (Van Hooren et al., 2014).

The article contributes to understanding crisis effects on social protection by posing this question in slightly different terms – investigating how envisioning protracted and multidimensional crises shapes policy proposals by international organisations (IOs) in the field of social protection. Due to the fact that this article is part of a special issue on ‘quantified futures’, the article is particularly interested in quantified ways of anticipating crises. Why is that question relevant? For one thing, the role of IOs in the current Covid crisis, and in crisis management in general, is still under-investigated (but see Agartan et al., 2020; Leisering, 2021; Van Hecke et al., 2021), whereas country responses have been researched fairly well (Béland et al., 2021a; Greer et al., 2021). After an immediate crisis management phase, IOs quickly turned towards theorising on how to ‘build back better’ after the pandemic, with social protection being a key component (Leisering, 2021: 410). The production of policy prescriptions by IOs is a crucial element of global social policy, because in this field IOs largely lack coercive and authoritative powers (Kaasch, 2013: 47–49). For another thing, crises only have an impact when actors perceive the need for change due to the uncertainty and unpredictability of a challenging situation (Boin et al., 2009; Kreuder-Sonnen and White, 2021). Crises and emergencies can be disruptive and transform key policy and governing rationales (Jarman, 2021; Rosenthal et al., 2001). More than that, crises do so not only by necessitating management in the present but also by containing future expectations, eliciting wants and desires as well as anticipations of likely and less likely events (Beckert, 2016; Gibson, 2011; Mica et al., 2021).

So, instead of externalising crises as a potential trigger of transformations (as most policy analysts do), the article asks, first, what role – frequently quantified – anticipations and visions of future crises play in social protection policy proposals. This special issue explores the link of quantified futures with policymaking and global governance, arguing that quantified futures constitute particularly persuasive representations of universal challenges that require urgent care. The contribution of this article is to show that quantified futures in the form of anticipations of crisis are not only utilised narratively, as the legitimisation of the need for certain policy prescriptions, functioning as windows of opportunity for IOs to prominently place their preferred policies on the agenda, but that quantified futures also intervene in actual policy proposal design. The article explores, second, if IOs reinvent the role of social protection in light of anticipated futures – or if their visions rather reinforce a status quo in global social protection policy, meaning that core ideas of social protection stay the same pre- and post-pandemic. Here, the article shows that, in the case of narrative utilisations of crisis frames as legitimisation for the expansion of social protection, the underlying ideas behind social protection remain unchanged, whereas policy models such as ‘adaptive social protection’ (ASP) that embed crises in their design emphasise resilience and preparedness as new goals of social protection. Especially today, with multiple pressing global challenges and looming crises on the horizon that intrinsically revolve around the future – most clearly visible in the case of climate change but also in discussions of the challenges around a post-Covid recovery, including skyrocketing poverty rates and societies drifting apart due to rising inequalities – we need to know how crisis visions are produced, authoritatively interpreted, diffuse, and shape decision-making.

The article proceeds as follows. First, a theoretical section elaborates on the article’s interpretive and ideational perspective on (quantified) crisis anticipations in the production of policy proposals. Second, the article details how IOs converge around envisioning the future as a continued crisis, which is frequently expressed in quantified terms. Then, two different ways of how IOs relate their policy proposals to these anticipations of crises are discussed. This includes, third, proposals conceiving of global challenges as opportunities that do not fundamentally reimagine the role of social protection but rather promote its expansion, and, fourth, the policy model of ASP, which responds to an understanding of global challenges as threats by implementing resilience and preparedness in that policy model’s design.

Theory: Anticipated crises and policy change

This section will begin by outlining predominant perspectives on the role of crises in the policy process to illuminate – in contrast – this article’s theoretical emphasis on the influence of crisis anticipation on policymaking.

Most scholarship in social policy that questions the impact of crises on welfare systems is interested in identifying either continuity or transformation of political institutions and policies, and asks, thus, to what extent crises have resulted in path-breaking change. Therefore, the literature underlines the importance of these exceptional events as exogenous shocks that call into question traditional modes of thinking, established approaches and existing institutions to deal with problems (Béland and Powell, 2016). Crises have been understood as ‘critical junctures’ (Thelen, 2004) in which deviations from ‘path-dependent’ (Pierson, 2004) developments are possible, as occasions for the opening of ‘windows of opportunity’ (Kingdon, 1984) that allow actors to enact extensive reforms. Crises are also critical periods that might enable far-reaching ‘paradigm shifts’ (Hall, 1993) due to uncertainties threatening to overwhelm institutions, necessitating a rethink of fundamental principles. Given its ‘lock-in effects’ and ‘increasing returns’ (Pierson, 1993: 607), welfare regimes have been described as remarkably stable (Esping-Andersen, 1990), requiring exceptional events to transform settings otherwise characterised by ‘punctuated equilibria’ (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993). It is debated why some crises lead to long-term paradigm shifts while others do not (Van Hooren et al., 2014). An emerging literature has pointed out that gradual and incremental change is more common than sudden change through exogenous shocks (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010), occurring rather endogenously as ‘drift’, ‘conversion’ or ‘layering’ of policies (Hacker, 2004: 246–249; see also Thelen, 2004). In short, not only the process of change but also the actual effects of crises as important transformational events are disputed.

Some institutionalist scholars have turned to ideas to analyse change but here, too, crises are still being externalised to the environment, where they are investigated as triggers that set in motion policy change. Ideas can assume different shapes, from beliefs, to programmes or models of policies, to broader discursive frameworks (Campbell, 1998; Mehta, 2011). Scholars argue that ideas can influence the policy process

as sense-making heuristics that guide people’s actions, [. . .] as strategic tools that actors use to craft political discourse, and [. . .] as institutional frameworks that have an effect on their own and maintain some order throughout the actions of individuals, groups, and society (Swinkels, 2020: 283).

For most ideational scholars, though, ideas only become relevant as an explanatory variable when all other accounts of policy change – interest-based or institutional – fail to make sense (Béland, 2009); particularly during crises, where uncertainty overwhelms decision-makers, requiring (Blyth, 2002) and spawning new ideas (Hogan and Feeney, 2012). Due to their primary interest in explaining policy outcomes – the origin, change or stability of policies – these perspectives approach ideas as independent variables, leading to a static understanding of the concept. Ideas are drawn on to predict why some crises result in far-reaching transformations and others do not. The relationship between the explanatory variable (the exogenous event) and the object of interest (change or stability of institutions or policies) is not made visible, since the former is just a condition for the latter. But, as we learn from scholarship on crises and policy change, not every crisis fundamentally questions existing practices and policy frameworks.

While engaging with the role of ideas in policymaking, this article thus shifts its attention from approaching crises as an external explanatory trigger for policy change or stability towards the question of how crises – in the form of anticipations of crises – concretely impact policymaking, in an attempt to illuminate the relationship between crises and policies. The article does not claim that existing approaches fail at explaining the outcome of crisis-induced policy change (or continuity); rather, it turns towards exploring how crises and their effects are perceived and communicated, and how solutions envisaged as a response are framed in light of these crises. While being interested in the effect of crises – similar to the approaches above – the article thus concentrates on the impact of the currently proliferating talk of protracted, multidimensional and global crises on policymaking, instead of objective crisis conditions. As a recent review of the role of the climate emergency term in policymaking highlights: ‘the implications of this new framing for governance and policy remain under-theorized and under-investigated’ (McHugh et al., 2021), and the article contributes to crisis research by investigating these frames in order to gather more insights on the transformative power of such exceptional events.

Why focus on IOs, and why on policy models? IOs are key contributors to (global) social policy; they reflect on current challenges and crises (Olsson and Verbeek, 2018), and their policy recommendations can gain considerable traction in reform movements, ushering in far-reaching departures from the status quo (see, for example, for social cash transfers Leisering, 2019; for pension privatisation Orenstein, 2008). While IOs are not themselves able to implement social policies, since these are largely administrated on the national level – even though often supported by IOs through the supply of knowledge and funding (Deacon, 2007; Niemann et al., 2021) – IOs frame issues of concern that they try to push onto the global agenda. Their policy models are sets of interconnected assumptions and claims about how a particular policy works, how its constituent parts relate to each other and what goals it serves (Behrends et al., 2014; Weyland, 2009). Models are themselves ideas of instruments and should be conceptually distinguished from implemented policies; it is not guaranteed that proposals are realised in actual policymaking. But changes in policy models potentially spawn policy change by offering decision-makers blueprints for action (Von Gliszczynski and Leisering, 2016). In line with an interpretive perspective, the article does not view policy models as mere products of instrumental action or the functioning of institutions but as outcomes of interpretive conflicts over the interpretation of policies (Yanow, 2015), including how the ‘social’ is defined, what problem constructions inform social protection policies and how to achieve their goals (Fischer, 2003; Schmidt, 2008).

How does the anticipation of crises and policymaking interrelate? The construction of crises, apart from pointing to an immediate demand for action in the form of crisis management (Braun, 2015), tends to go along with questioning the future itself, which is framed as being in a fragile and endangered state. During the open coding phase of the empirical analysis of crisis themes in social protection discourse, this insight, that is widespread in the literature (Adey and Anderson, 2012; Jarvis, 2021; Kaur, 2022), has been corroborated. During the pandemic, IOs have quickly moved on to discussing future social protection in light of coming crises, after an initial phase of proposing solutions and collecting best practices for how to deal with urgent problems in the present (Leisering, 2021).

Temporality is ‘central to all real policy-making’ (Schubert, 2015: 373); it is implicit in how policymaking is structured – partitioned into particular phases (e.g. the policy cycle or democratic terms of office) or organised along specific deadlines (Howlett and Goetz, 2014). But actors are also engaged in ‘the making and unmaking of visions for the future’ (Berten and Kranke, 2022: 156) through various anticipatory practices, which can have real effects on policymaking in the present on their own. To address these different ways of ‘making present’ the future, and their implications for policymaking, the article uses the concept of (crisis) anticipation, which denotes the practice of envisioning (fragile, endangered or challenged) futures and acting in advance of these expected, (un-)desirable and/or (im-)probable future states (Alvial-Palavicino, 2015; Anderson, 2010; Flyverbom and Garsten, 2021). Even though in social policy scholarship there has been increasing attention towards the structural component of temporality (Peck and Theodore, 2015; Stubbs, 2018), this has not been accompanied yet by a comparable interest in how the observation and communication of future events legitimises, orients or otherwise influences policymaking (but see Berten, 2022; Ervik, 2005). A burgeoning literature in International Relations, security studies or Science & Technology Studies has demonstrated the utility of such a perspective on anticipation and futures (Aykut et al., 2019; de Goede, 2008; Esguerra, 2019).

The article builds on this interdisciplinary scholarship on temporality and, particularly, futurisation, to better understand the impact of crises on policymaking – by focusing on crisis anticipation. Even though the future itself cannot be known, actors still try to envision possible developments and calculate probable outcomes through various means of forecasting, estimating and simulating. By delineating goals, defining plans, subscribing to hopeful visions and picturing undesirable outlooks, decision-makers formulate where they achieve to be, how they intend to get there and what to avoid in the process (Adam and Groves, 2007; Beckert, 2016; Berten and Kranke, 2022). The medium of futuring makes a difference: compared to mere qualitative ways of envisioning, quantified techniques reinforce the prescriptive character of visions; they can be expected to generate an impression of exceptional salience, universalisation and urgency of issues, which makes them a particular cogent instrument of representing global challenges (see this special issue’s introduction).

From the literature on futures and futuring, we can take away that not every problematisation of future crises leads to (far-ranging) policy change: its scope, direction and magnitude depend on how future crises are perceived and how these are related to policymaking. On one hand, future crises can provide temporal narratives or frames that assist in the conceptualisation of a problem and assign particular groups, individuals or the state the responsibility to alleviate a particular condition (Felt et al., 2014). Narratives influence how actors are able to present certain issues as challenges that need to be overcome, while others are pushed into the background. Temporalities of ‘states of exception’ (Hulme, 2019: 23), for instance, can influence policymaking through legitimations of (in-)action (‘we need to act now to prevent something from happening’, or ‘we need to know more before we can act’). On the other hand, visions of crises – looming threats and uncertain developments that require urgent care (Boin et al., 2009; Lipscy, 2020) – can manifest in policy models’ design, becoming embedded in the core rationale of policies. This potentially includes a policy’s problem constructions and goals, and prescriptions of how a policy should work towards these; benefits, and conditions for receiving benefits; beneficiaries or target groups, and how a policy is supposed to target and reach them; financing criteria; and, finally, governance and administrative systems.

Methods: A qualitative analysis of the role of anticipations of crisis in policymaking

Empirically, the article’s results have been produced through a qualitative document analysis building on Grounded Theory. The article analyses key IOs’ contributions to social protection as a crisis or emergency response measure: the World Bank, the International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). These IOs were selected based on the following criteria. First, a list of those IOs was drawn up that are considered significant in global social protection discourse (based on key works in global social policy, for instance Deacon, 2007). Second, a scan of these IOs’ Covid-era publications that were available online was conducted, with the aim of identifying statements on social protection in times of crisis or as an emergency response measure; IOs that discussed this theme were considered for selection. The IOs finally selected cover a variety of (a) mandates, (b) ideological orientations and (c) perspectives on crises, broadly characterised either by notions of ‘opportunity’ or ‘threat’ (or a mix of both; see Table 1).

Table 1.

Selection of IOs.

IO	Mandate	Ideological orientation	Crisis as . . .
ILO	Work and other social issues (key contributor to social protection discourse since the organisation’s emergence in 1919)	Social democracy and tripartism	Opportunity
World Bank	Development, but increasing engagement with social issues since the 1990s (Hall, 2007)	Considered ‘neoliberal’ and in ideological opposition to the ILO (despite recent collaborations on universal social protection; Leisering, 2020)	Threat
UNICEF	Children, mothers, families	Human rights-based, humanitarian	Mixed
WFP	Food aid in development contexts	Human rights-based, humanitarian (emergency focus)	Mixed

Source: The author.

IO: international organisation; ILO: International Labour Organization; UNICEF: United Nations Children’s Fund; WFP: World Food Programme.

In addition, a number of other organisations’ and individuals’ contributions to social protection discourse were also considered in the empirical analysis. Their inclusion into the database followed guidelines from Grounded Theory; documents were selected if they were referenced as key precursors to the origin and development of social protection policy models that were informed by crisis anticipations. For instance, ASP did not originate during the Covid crisis, and so even though the analysis was initially conducted based on Covid-era documents, later phases also included documents published before the pandemic to investigate the policy model’s genesis. Documents were analysed until a level of saturation was met.

The inclusion criteria resulted in a total amount of 35 publicly available documents, which have been analysed based on Grounded Theory coding strategies: an initial step of open coding (interested in the general themes observable in the data), a second step of axial or comparative coding (comparing the initial codes across documents) and a third and final step of selective, theoretical coding (wherein more focused coding inspired by the developing theoretical connections has been undertaken; see Charmaz, 2006; Corbin and Strauss, 2015). The analysis and interpretation phases were informed by an interest in social protection during crises and emergencies, without concretely prescribing a specific direction from the outset to allow for an open-ended analysis in the tradition of Grounded Theory.

During the empirical analysis, two discursive strands on social protection and anticipations of crisis were reconstructed: one that utilises these anticipations as a legitimising device for calls for expanding social protection; and another that embeds crisis themes (for instance resilience and preparedness) in the design of social protection policy models. Because of the article’s interest in exploring changes in social protection ideas due to crisis anticipations, and since it was empirically found that expansion does not go along with significant changes in policy models, an emphasis of the empirical analysis was on the latter, leading to a focus on the policy model of ‘adaptive social protection’ as one prominent instance of a policy model that embeds crisis anticipations in its design.² The next section will deliberate on crisis anticipations in general, before the article proceeds with outlining the main results of the empirical analysis: the two discursive strands mentioned above.

Visions of proliferating, protracted, multidimensional and global crises

During the early phases of the Covid pandemic, countries quickly implemented emergency social policies – particularly social assistance – and extended the coverage of existing programmes so that they could function as automatic stabilisers of the economy and as means of cushioning hardships, such as unemployment and poverty (Béland et al., 2021a). This crisis management phase was characterised by a radical focus on the present and immediate future, managed through health figures – statistics of available intensive care beds, numbers of newly infected, and the reproduction number – as well as economic figures, to keep new infections in check and alleviate adverse social and economic repercussions of the crisis. Across ideological barriers and around the globe, social protection was generally perceived as a beneficial policy (Béland et al., 2021b; Cantillon et al., 2021; Devereux, 2021; Greve et al., 2021; Lu et al., 2020), similar to the financial and economic crisis of the late 2000s.³ While countries were still involved in crisis management, IO discourse quickly shifted towards the future, discussing how to ‘build back better’ using social protection (Leisering, 2021). Before delving into the social protection policy proposals of IOs formulated in light of these futures in the next section, this section first discusses IOs’ future projections in general, as found in Covid-era documents.

In general, IOs foresee the extension of past crises into the future. Visions are often quantified and highly bleak, both in their financial outlooks and in the dimension of human suffering, signified by death counts, numbers of destroyed homes and other quantifiable developments. For instance, the World Bank (2020a: 2) recounts past losses through disasters, which it denotes as ‘life-threatening’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘extreme’:

The annual frequency of disasters increased by 250 percent and the number of affected people increased by 185 percent between 1980 and 2012. [. . .] The economic losses [. . .] were estimated to be around US$70.3 billion in 2015, but increased to US$141 billion in 2016, and US$335 billion in 2017. Looking ahead, the financial and human impacts of disasters are forecasted to exponentially increase in the years to come (World Bank, 2020a: 1–2).

Climate change is expected to [. . .] push an additional 100 million people into extreme poverty by 2030. Forced displacement also has hit record highs in recent years, with an estimated 20 persons fleeing their homes every 60 seconds and more than 64 million people being displaced worldwide in 2016 (World Bank, 2020d: 1).

A United Nations (UN) (2021: 3–4) document reports that a ‘two-track recovery is now creating a great divergence, which, if not corrected, will undermine trust and solidarity and fuel conflict and forced migration, and make the world more vulnerable to future crises, including climate change’, paralleled by a global job loss ‘estimated to be 75 million in 2021 and 23 million in 2022’. Due to technological advances in prediction, many climate change–induced disasters are not anymore seen as unpredictable but as calculable and periodically occurring events (World Bank, 2022a: 21, 228). As these examples illustrate, global challenges around climate change, pandemics, conflicts, migration and economic recession are seen as periodically recurring regularities, and they are viewed as intrinsically interwoven (Bozorgmehr et al., 2020; World Bank, 2020b).

As the introduction to this special issue (Berten and Kranke, 2024) argues, the quantification of futures increases the perceived salience, scope and urgency of global challenges. Quantified crisis futures are particularly persuasive due to their numerically underpinned threat character and the seemingly more objective notion of numbers (salience; Porter, 1995). They construct a universal interpretation of the causes and consequences of global challenges by abstracting from local and particular contexts (scope; Heintz, 2012). Finally, quantified futures emphasise the need to act now to prevent adverse impacts of crises in the future (urgency; Barbehön, 2018). It is thus not unsurprising that IOs frequently resort to quantified projections of crisis.

But how do these anticipations impact IO policy proposals concretely, and what does this mean for the ways in which social protection reacts? Based on the empirical analysis that specifically explored the impact of crisis anticipations on social protection policy proposals, this article has identified two discursive strands of how to ‘build back better’ in light of these futures, even though these sometimes overlap and can even co-exist within particular documents. A first discursive strand mobilises more hopeful futures, to be ushered in after the crisis. Here, the phrase ‘to build back better’ (ILO, 2022; World Bank, n.d.) underlines that beyond providing immediate relief, countries should understand the current crisis as a turning point for initiating a more equitable future, utilising it as a ‘unique policy window’ (ILO, 2021c: 24) for expanding social protection underpinned by social rights. A second discursive strand emphasises the need to increase the resilience of social protection systems and populations to prepare these better for future crises, which are deemed inevitable, and to tackle future global challenges more effectively, including pandemics, climate change or digitalisation. ‘Building back better’ is understood here as a return to states of normalcy. Leisering (2021) similarly points to the importance of anticipations in Covid-era policy discourse, finding that social protection is seen as important in ‘preparing for future shocks, expanding social protection and making social protection sustainable’ (Leisering, 2021: 410).⁴ Summed up, the notion of crisis as a particular type of global challenge can either be translated into opportunities opening up or be considered a threat. The next paragraphs delve into the role that the anticipation of crises plays in the formulation and design of social protection policy proposals.

Human-centred recovery and the eco-social contract: Global challenges as opportunities

Faced with rising inequality and poverty due to the Covid pandemic, and projections of a prolonged crisis, a number of actors develop social protection policy proposals that push for a more equitable and sustainable future. Concrete imaginations of how to respond to crises, utilising social protection, vary (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Social protection policy proposals by select IOs in times of Covid.

IO	Problem groups	Key concern	Connection to anticipations of crisis
ILO	Worker figure; informally employed	Formalisation of informal labour markets; achieving universal coverage of social protection	Window of opportunity for extending universal coverage
World Bank	Poor people; informally employed	Preparation for future shocks; adding an activation element to social assistance (e.g. education and training)	Crisis as threat that needs to be prepared for using ‘adaptive social protection’
UNICEF	Poor and vulnerable children, mothers, families	Expanding coverage of cash transfers (rights-based)	Strengthening responsiveness to future crises (general expansion, emergency extensions, ‘shock-responsive social protection’)
WFP	(Food-insecure) vulnerable groups	Food security, particularly in fragile contexts	Strengthening inclusivity and ‘shock-responsiveness’ (particular focus on rural contexts)

Source: The author, based on ILO (2021b, 2021c), UNICEF (2020), World Bank (2021a, 2021b) and WFP (2021).

IO: international organisation; ILO: International Labour Organization; UNICEF: United Nations Children’s Fund; WFP: World Food Programme.

Many of the IOs investigated utilise the crisis as an opportunity for promoting the expansion of social protection – but do not leave behind existing policy priorities. The ILO continues to advocate for universal social protection, as it has done since the early 2000s (Deacon, 2013; ILO, 2021c; von Gliszczynski and Leisering, 2016). UNICEF (2020), similarly, calls for investments in social protection systems. The World Bank (2020c) observes a need to concentrate funding on safety nets for the poor and vulnerable. As part of a ‘Global Call to Action’ for a ‘human-centred recovery’, the ILO and a number of other international agencies have pledged to combat the highly unequal economic ramifications of the Covid pandemic by ensuring universal access to social protection (ILO, 2021a). The UN Secretary-General proclaimed a ‘Global Accelerator on Jobs and Social Protection’, with the goal of raising close to USD 1 trillion every year for the expansion of social protection, investments in green growth and stronger labour markets (UN, 2021).

Calls for expanding social protection in light of anticipated crises rely on the observation that existing coverage gaps put people across the income spectrum and across the life course at risk, and highlight existing gaps in social protection quality for particular groups and countries (ILO, 2021c: 67–70). Foregrounding human rights arguments, the UN (2020: 3; original emphasis) formulates that ‘we have an obligation to ensure everyone is protected and included in the response to this crisis’, thus demanding to extend coverage to everyone affected by the crisis. Many documents postulate a prioritisation of those groups most vulnerable, such as the poor, the informally employed, women, old-aged people, children, the disabled, minorities, indigenous people, migrants and refugees (ILO, 2021c: 5–7; UN, 2020: 7–8, 11–12; World Bank, 2020c: 2). New vulnerable groups have emerged due to the pandemic, for instance urban job holders in middle-income countries (World Bank, 2020b: 11). Organisations traditionally wedded to one or more of these groups, such as UNICEF, which focuses on children and families (UNICEF, 2020: 4), or the ILO, with its Decent Work-related policy of transforming informal into formal work arrangements (ILO, 2021b: 23), retain their target group emphasis irrespective of the crisis, since crisis-induced vulnerabilities only strengthen their arguments towards extending coverage to all (ILO, 2021b: 67–70).

Most IOs thus seem largely content with rehashing their existing policy proposals and have not begun to fundamentally reimagine their pre-pandemic stances in light of anticipated crises (Leisering, 2021). Most proposals legitimised by current and coming crises relate to single parameters of policies, such as – sometimes greatly – expanding the range of target groups or advocating for more generous spending. Even though it is not this article’s research question, one could assume that the Covid crisis did not lead to a path-breaking change in social protection policy proposals because the Covid crisis, similar to past crises, has actually demonstrated the benefit of social protection rather than calling it into question. Therefore, IOs that already pushed for the expansion of social protection over the globe have only been confirmed in their proposals; many of the existing IO policy proposals already envisage greater transformations in the role of social protection in society.

So what is the impact of anticipated crises on these policy proposals, bearing in mind that content-wise, they do not seem to have changed from before Covid-19? Summed up, within discourses that conceive of global challenges as opportunities, the role of current and anticipated crises is restricted to providing a negative scenario that is to be averted. ‘Crisis’ thus serves as a legitimising frame for the IOs’ preferred policy interventions, justifying the expansion of social protection overall and bolstering their particular recommendations, which mostly remain unchanged when compared with pre-Covid times (see, for example, explicitly, ILO, 2021c: 11).

Adaptive social protection: Global challenges as threats

Besides being used as an opportunity to legitimise expanding social protection, anticipated crises can also become embedded within social protection policy models. Within a discourse of inevitable crises and urgent challenges due to threats and risks on the horizon, concepts of social protection that emphasise the need to prepare for and adapt to the future have gained traction in a number of IOs (see, for example, ILO, 2021c: 11; WFP, 2021; World Bank, 2020d). A particularly prominent example – apart from the related model of ‘shock-responsive social protection’ (see UNICEF, 2023a, 2023b) – is the concept of ASP (see Figure 1), which is mainly put forward by the World Bank. While not all documents on social protection by the Bank address ASP, ASP has become ‘a dedicated area of focus’ (World Bank, 2020d: vii) in the Bank’s work on social protection. In 2020, a dedicated publication on ASP came out (World Bank, 2020d), among a number of other works that address particular dimensions of ASP (Cubas et al., 2020) and regional applications (World Bank, 2020a). The Bank’s ‘Social Protection and Jobs (SPJ) Compass’ (World Bank, 2022b: VII), an update to its most recent social protection and labour strategy, considers ASP in the explanation of one of the three goals of social protection: resilience (World Bank, 2022b: XIII-XV). Other actors have joined the debate and also publish on ASP (see, for example, GIZ, 2023). Noteworthy is that ASP has not been a product of paradigmatic and revolutionary change due to the Covid crisis. It has emerged through incremental changes of core ideas of social protection in the course of the last two decades in the light of multiple global challenges – among them, crucially, climate change.

Figure 1.

ASP – main elements of the policy model.

The concept of ASP demands a fundamental overhaul of core tenets of social protection. The perceived inevitability of future crises prompts the claim that social protection systems need to adapt as well (IDS, 2012a: 6–7; World Bank, 2018a: 84, 2020d: vii–viii); the concept of adaptation, as found in disaster risk reduction and the broader environmental and climate change discourse (Bassett and Fogelman, 2013), has thus been adopted by social protection. ASP undertakes a shift in its underlying problem construction, compared with traditional social protection: from alleviating present needs to addressing the more dynamic and future-oriented vulnerability of its target groups. ASP also shifts from ex-post coping alone to ex ante preparation and adaptation, which involves strengthening systemic, collective and individual resilience as a new goal of social protection policy (IDS, 2012a: 24; World Bank, 2020d: vii). As part of that, ASP reinterprets the classic notion of risk within social protection (Kuriakose et al., 2013: 21–22). This section shows how ASP is directly interlinked with anticipations of crises, frequently explicitly in the form of quantified futures. Within the model of ASP, futures fulfil more than a mere legitimising role – as in calls for expanding social protection (see the former section) – but rather inform particular design principles, exemplifying the larger impact of anticipations of crises on social protection policy proposals, including its design.

The origins of ASP: Predecessors and influences

The ideational roots of ASP lie in a combination of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation with social protection policy (IDS, 2012b; World Bank, 2020a: 13). The World Bank recounts the Oxford Policy Management shock-responsive social protection systems series (O’Brien et al., 2018) and the Building Resilience and Adaption to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) framework (Bahadur et al., 2015) as inspirations. But the concept has originated in the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). Initially, the goals of ASP were oriented on a definition of social protection by Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler (2004), which sees social protection as contributing to ‘protection’, ‘prevention’ and ‘promotion’, while enacting broader societal and political ‘transformations’ to reduce the causes of vulnerability. All this, according to the IDS, contributes to resilience (Davies et al., 2008a: 111; IDS, 2012a). The World Bank became involved in the early 2010s, due to being contracted by the UK Department for International Development (DFID; Béné et al., 2018: 3), and participated in multi-agency workshops and forums that brought together the different communities of disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and social protection (IDS, 2012a: 4). In its discussions of ASP, the Bank largely cut out the notion of ASP being ‘transformative’ and discussed resilience in a more narrow sense – understood as enhancing the risk-taking capacities and self-responsibilities of individuals and households (World Bank, 2020a: 13, 2020d: vii, 120; see also Kuriakose et al., 2013: 22). Nowadays, ASP is promoted as a general instrument of dealing with crises and disasters, including the Covid pandemic (World Bank, 2020a: vii). A number of actors have theorised on ASP but the World Bank has established itself as a key contributor, which is why the analysis particularly revolves around World Bank documents.

The way in which the World Bank discusses ASP does not constitute a radical departure from earlier social protection thinking within the Bank; on the contrary, key characteristics of ASP build on earlier foundations.

Even before the creation of the dedicated Social Protection & Labor sector in the World Bank in 1996 (World Bank, 2009: 1) – and increasingly afterwards – a number of World Bank publications and policies have focused on human capital generation, which is also a key element within ASP (see Figure 1). The World Development Report 1990 on poverty had already focused on how to increase poor people’s productivity (World Bank, 1990) and remake them into development agents of their own (von Gliszczynski, 2015: 105). In the World Development Report 2000, this was sharpened by emphasising social investment, activation and human capital generation, highlighting the role of education and health (World Bank, 2001). Instruments such as safety nets and conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are supposed to contribute to these goals; the receipt of CCTs is, for instance, conditional on behaviour that is deemed beneficial for human capital development.

Already in Robert Holzmann’s (then Sector Director for Social Protection and Labor) Social Risk Management (SRM) framework (Holzmann and Jørgensen, 2000), which became the foundation of the first Social Protection & Labor strategy of the Bank (World Bank, 2001), ‘reactive public measures’ (Holzmann and Jørgensen, 2000: 1) were criticised, favouring ex ante strategies of prevention and mitigation that are also crucial in the model of ASP. ‘Prevention’ aims to avert people becoming subjected to a risk at all, for example, through human capital development, while ‘mitigation’ aims to guarantee that people are not as heavily affected by a risk. A third strategy of ‘coping’ is supposed to ensure ‘to relieve the impact of the risk once it has occurred’, for example, through migration or reliance on transfers (Holzmann and Jørgensen, 2000: 15). SRM, also, promotes a shift from poverty alleviation to vulnerability reduction, to prevent vulnerable people from falling into poverty in the first place (Holzmann and Jørgensen, 2000: 3). SRM further introduced the concept of resilience, in so far as the ‘likelihood of being harmed by a shock depends on (i) a person’s resilience to a given shock’ (Holzmann and Jørgensen, 2000: 6), which can include risks such as ‘natural disasters [. . .], bad weather [. . .], and health-related problems’ (Holzmann and Jørgensen, 2000: 4).

Later publications, the 2001 Social Protection & Labor strategy and its 2012 successor, only sharpened these existing emphases on vulnerability, resilience and preventive action. Whereas in 2001, the three objectives of improving earning opportunities, improving security and improving equity (World Bank, 2009: 2) were underlying the Bank’s work on social protection, the 2012 strategy exchanged ‘security’ with ‘resilience’, making this an even more important term in the Bank’s social protection ideas. However, resilience, then, was largely synonymous with ‘helping people insure against drops in well being from different types of shocks’ (World Bank, 2012: I) – in the ASP model, resilience becomes much more encompassing, as will be shown in the next sections.

While ASP is thus, as will be shown in detail below, not a sudden revolution in World Bank thinking on social protection but rather the outcome of slow and incremental change, the core tenets of ASP have, already in its origins, been inspired and justified by anticipated crises:

The world is increasingly becoming interconnected and risky, with economic shocks and epidemics flowing across national borders. While young people seek jobs in record numbers in some places, aging is shrinking the productive population and ushering in new fiscal challenges in others. Poverty, inequality, and exclusion still persist in every country (World Bank, 2012: III).

The recent food, fuel and financial crises vividly demonstrated the need for social protection and labor systems that can quickly and effectively respond to those affected by systemic shocks and crises. Countries without adequate systems in place were less able to respond effectively to protect the poor and support recovery from shocks (World Bank, 2012: VII).

The 2022 Social Protection and Jobs Compass that updates the most recent strategy does not fundamentally depart from its predecessor; it still subscribes to the same three goals (World Bank, 2022b). Similarly, it legitimises social protection policy proposals with a changing global context amid a multitude of crises (World Bank, 2022b: VII), including climate change, technological developments, gender disparities and armed conflicts (World Bank, 2022b: VIII).

From a static to a dynamic problematisation: The forward-looking character of vulnerability and resilience

The concepts of vulnerability and resilience are direct responses to the anticipation of ever more frequent crises that threaten well-being on an individual, household and systemic level – so that well-being has to be secured. The first of these concepts, vulnerability, has, over time, become a more and more prevalent problem construction in development discourse where it has either replaced or complements the older and more static concept of poverty (Best, 2013). The temporal orientation of interventions related to poverty on the one hand and vulnerability on the other hand differs: whereas measures alleviating poverty do so ex post, after an individual or household has become poor, vulnerability calls for ex ante interventions: ‘vulnerability refers to the risk of future poverty’ (Tandon and Hasan, 2005; see also Cafiero and Vakis, 2006) or, in other words, represents the potential that these risks evolve in a negative way. Thus, acting based on vulnerability relies on pre-emptively combating the emergence of poverty, since its adverse implications are said to only materialise under certain conditions in the future (IDS, 2012a: 13). Social protection reacting to vulnerability aims, for instance, at building human capital of vulnerable households to protect them from becoming poor in the first place, instead of only intervening after a household has already become poor. However, in light of the fact that one of the core functions of social protection is to fulfill immediate needs, ASP’s vulnerability orientation contains a noteworthy shift of the underlying problem construction towards the future (Leisering, 2008: 76) and thus towards something that has not become reality yet. Since existing models and ideas, such as CCTs (Sugiyama, 2011) or ‘activation’ (Bonoli, 2013), are directed at a similar goal, the vulnerability orientation within ASP does not constitute a paradigm shift though.

The second concept, resilience, aims at improving the capacity to prepare for, cope with and adapt to future shocks (Kuriakose et al., 2013: 21–22). Within the logic of ASP, vulnerability and resilience are seen as intrinsically connected since a vulnerable household is conceived as one that has a low degree of resilience. In general, resilience can either be addressed on the individual, household or institutional (for instance, social protection system) level. As previously discussed, for the World Bank, resilience has long been key to social protection. However, it has over time been broadened in its meaning. In the 2012 social protection strategy, resilience was metonymic with the application of social insurance (World Bank, 2012: 1). Nowadays, its meaning covers a broad range of mechanisms intended ‘to build the resilience of poor and vulnerable households to [. . .] covariate shocks’ (World Bank, 2020d: 1), including through ASP (World Bank, 2020d: 6–7).

Resilience can either be interpreted as a reinvigoration of the status quo or as a push for more transformative change; in the broader literature on climate change, where the concept has originated, we find both meanings. On the one hand, resilience can be interpreted as ‘bounce-back-ability’ (Davoudi, 2012, 301), an ‘understanding of resilience as a buffer capacity for preserving what we have and recovering to where we were [. . .] without questioning what normality entails’ (Davoudi, 2012: 302, original emphasis). On the other hand, resilience can be connected to transformative aspirations, when social and political contexts are identified as possible drivers of vulnerability and obstacles to resilience. In early documents on ASP by IDS, such a transformative motivation was still prominent (Davies et al., 2008b, 2011: 3–6; IDS, 2007). When the World Bank took up the concept and further theorised on the model, this transformative understanding of resilience was removed and an interpretation of ‘returning to normal’ became the predominant one (World Bank, 2018b: 1–3, 2020d: 3–5) – in the words of the Bank: ‘recovering to pre-shock levels of well-being’ (World Bank, 2020d: 3).

While ASP systems adopt the notion of shared and collective responsibilities, individuals are still made responsible in various ways for their own well-being (World Bank, 2020d: 7). All variations of ASP share the aspiration of changing ‘the time horizon beyond short-term interventions aimed at supporting peoples’ coping strategies and/or graduation objectives, towards longer-term interventions that can help promote transformation towards climate and disaster resilient livelihood options’ (Davies et al., 2013: 27). Thus, ASP is considered an investment for long-term adaptation (World Bank, 2020d: 49). However, there is a notable difference between transformative and ‘back to normal’ uses of resilience: in the first case, societal and economic drivers of vulnerability are identified and should be overcome; in the second case, risks are individualised – while in the World Bank’s notion, instruments such as ASP intend to assist individuals in strengthening their resilience, it is the individual’s responsibility alone to cope and adapt. ‘Interventions that promote more productive and resilient livelihoods have the potential for empowering beneficiaries to diversify their asset and livelihood portfolios and to reduce their exposure and vulnerability to shocks’ (World Bank, 2020d: 16), which can simply mean migration into safer environments but can also mean an occupational change or a change in the way of living (World Bank, 2020d: 4). Overall, the underlying rationale thus translates to a neoliberal understanding of increasing self-help capacities of individuals by enabling individuals to cope with crises on their own, which connects to earlier policy rationales of the World Bank and others (UN, 1995: 50; World Bank, 1990: 56).

Traditionally, social protection reacts to standard risks occurring during the life course – calculable regularities that occur with a certain probability in a population, ranging from maternity, to unemployment, sickness, poverty and old-age (Ewald, 1991). Narratives around ASP criticise this classic notion of risk as being unsuitable for a reality of ever-worsening crises. Because of crises’ irregularity and intensity, the underlying rationale of social protection systems has to change. Since even technological advances cannot predict all the possible variations of crisis scenarios, ASP emphasises preparedness and even pre-emptive action to strengthen the capacity to respond to only partly calculable future shocks (World Bank, 2020d), making ‘the social protection system more prepared in advance of the next crisis’ (World Bank, 2020d: viii) – after or even before negative events take their toll. This way, social protection is transformed in its stated goals and design characteristics into a future-oriented measure that acts upon individuals before they become hit by shocks or become dependent on (other) social transfers – ‘Resiliency is proactive, rather than reactive’ (Coaffee, 2013: 326). Different to traditional social protection policies, ASP does not just prepare for ex-post coping after a shock has occurred but also for ex ante pre-emption before shocks have an effect. Thus, the way in which ASP mobilises the concepts of vulnerability and, more so, resilience does represent a considerable shift compared with traditional emphases in social protection policy (for more differences between social assistance, which is the Bank’s emphasis, and ASP, see Table 3). Compared with the other social protection policy proposals reviewed above (see the section on global challenges as opportunities), anticipated crises are not just the legitimisation of ASP but inform the underlying problem construction and the goal of the policy model.

Table 3.

Characteristics of traditional social assistance and adaptive social protection compared.

	Social assistance	ASP
Social problem	Poverty	Vulnerability
Goal	Compensation, provision	Resilience, prevention
Risk orientation	Calculable risks during the life course (poverty-related)	Pre-emption of emergencies (and their implications), aiming to turn threats into risks
Trigger	Immediate need (coping)	Projected need (preparation and adaptation) Immediate need (coping)

Source: The author.

ASP: adaptive social protection.

How preparedness and pre-emption become embedded in the design of ASP

Anticipating future crises is key to designing and implementing ASP – quantified futures play a role in identification and targeting as well as in benefit distribution. For instance, the Dominican Republic uses a Vulnerability to Climate Hazards Index to calculate how likely it is that a household becomes affected by natural catastrophes. The Index uses information ranging from ‘housing characteristics, estimated income, and proximity to a hazardous natural element’ (World Bank, 2020d: 38) to identify vulnerable groups. ‘In Uganda, satellite data and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Anomaly Index provide the basis for triggering earlier response to drought through the Northern Uganda Social Action Fund’s (NUSAF) cash-for-work program’ (World Bank, 2020d: 19). In Niger, a safety net includes ‘geographic targeting’ to factor in ‘vulnerability to climate shocks’. Criteria include ‘poverty, food insecurity’ and an index of vulnerability that quantifies effects of rainfall and drought, among others. Departments that reach a certain level on this index automatically become targeted by the safety net (World Bank, 2020d: 38). Countries experiencing regular droughts can use these sources of information to quickly adapt social protection systems in light of anticipated crises. Noteworthy is that all these measures utilise quantified futures in the form of calculative means of anticipating need to help in identification of beneficiaries and benefit distribution. Quantified futures do not anymore solely function as legitimising factors for social protection policies but are internalised as design principles in the form of measures emphasising preparedness and pre-emption.

The ASP logic dictates that the delivery, adequacy and coverage of benefits should quickly be adjusted in times of crisis, both vertically and horizontally expanding programmes (World Bank, 2020d: 13–14; see also IDS, 2012b: 2) to ‘maximize resilience-related outcomes’ (World Bank, 2020d: 33). On the design level, this translates, first, to a reimagination of ‘traditional targeting methods to factor in household vulnerability to shocks’ (World Bank, 2020d: viii), increasing responsiveness and enabling coordination with disaster risk management and climate change adaptation agents (World Bank, 2022a: 176–177). The World Bank laments that traditional social assistance measures ‘only reach a subset of those most vulnerable to shocks. The subset of the population reached [. . .] is a function of the safety net’s objectives and resultant decisions on eligibility criteria and coverage’ (World Bank, 2020d: 37). The IDS bemoans that acting based on ‘current vulnerability’ does not help in correctly targeting vulnerable populations, since new risks, such as climate change, call for targeting based on ‘projected future vulnerability’ (IDS, 2012a: 13). ASP, thus, introduces flexibility into how and when transfers and services are issued, based on flexible triggers of ‘crisis situations’. Future needs of potential beneficiaries need to be anticipated based on disaster risk studies and forecast techniques, which have moved away from viewing disasters as entirely happening by chance to seeing them as periodical events that, accordingly, countries and households can prepare for and adapt to (United Nations University (UNU) and Munich Climate Insurance Initiative (MCII), 2023: 36–46).

Second, benefit distribution is also determined ‘in advance of those shocks materializing in the future’ (World Bank, 2020d: viii). For instance,

where the needs of poor and vulnerable households are predictable in relation to shocks (such as rainy or lean seasons), the provision of benefits can be timed accordingly to align with this seasonality. This way, beneficiaries receive assistance ahead of the need to resort to negative coping mechanisms materializing, enhancing preparedness and the ability to cope (World Bank, 2020d: 39).

This turn towards pre-emption follows from an altered notion of risk assessment; events that ASP systems have to face reach beyond the uncertain but calculable risks of the past – ASP now needs to handle the highly volatile and inherently unpredictable possibilities looming on the (future) horizon. While preparation entails absorbing probable shocks to retain functions – or at least quickly return to a functioning state – pre-emption revolves around preventing the possibility that shocks may affect a system in the future in the first place. Since social protection measures can seldom prevent shocks themselves (such as climate change-related disasters), ASP aims to enable households to ex ante adapt to new realities that entail socio-economic ramifications of crises (World Bank, 2020d: 15–17). This necessitates integrating forward-looking anticipatory practices into systems of social protection, to respond to potential future needs before these reach a certain threshold or before they take shape at all (Daron et al., 2021; Williams and Moreira, 2020; World Bank, 2020d: 17–21, 2022a: 228–231). While ASP is not the only social protection policy model that implements anticipatory practices into social protection (see, for example, WFP, 2022, or Bharadwaj and Mitchell, 2022), it represents a prominent example of this broader transformation in social protection thinking.

Summed up, ASP undertakes a noteworthy shift compared to former or traditional models of social protection, by embedding preparedness and pre-emption in the policy itself, represented by various targeting, benefit distribution and anticipatory mechanisms. Thus, the above examples demonstrate that the anticipation of crises – again – fulfils more than a mere legitimatory role for the policy model of ASP but is translated into key policy design principles.

Conclusion

The article has scrutinised how anticipated crises become distinct influences on IOs’ policy proposals. The empirical results indicate that the frequently quantified ways of imagining the future as a continued crisis indeed shape social protection policies in the present, even though they do not influence policymaking in one singular way. Based on the empirical analysis, two sets of policy proposals have been differentiated that engage with dominant visions of increasingly prevalent crises. Whereas policy proposals working towards more equitable and sustainable alternatives use the dominant crisis-ridden future as legitimisation and opportunity, in the policy model of ‘adaptive social protection’ anticipated crises perform more crucial roles by informing the model’s design and key characteristics, including the problem construction and the main goal of the policy. ASP postulates a shift from the static problem of poverty to the future-oriented dynamic concept of vulnerability. Directly dealing with anticipated crises, ASP promotes strengthening individual, household and systemic resilience as pre-emptive actions and implements preparedness towards future crises as a guiding governing rationale through various targeting, benefit distribution and anticipatory mechanisms. Here, quantified futures in the form of anticipated crises transform key principles of social protection.

The expansion of ASP, if actually becoming more popular in nation-states worldwide haunted by fragile futures and endangered presents, can result in distinct changes in the landscape of global social protection. Redefining social protection as a means of preparing better for future crises, as in the case of ASP, could endanger accommodating more progressive utopian futures. Anticipating crises is a performative process by which the perceived need for measures supposedly better suited to responding to threats on the horizon is increased at the same time as the actual crisis response capacity is improved. This begs the question if social protection models aiming to invest in preparation for future crises at the same time diminish possibilities for ‘building back better’ in the sense of realising more progressive alternatives to the status quo. The answer depends on whether the transformative nature of ASP is gaining momentum again or whether a reductive interpretation of resilience prevails that focuses on reanimating and stabilising the status quo.

Forward-looking ‘preparedness’ and ‘pre-emption’ (Anderson, 2010) establish a state of emergency as a general rule, signifying the belief that future crises will tend to become more severe and more frequent. The perception of future challenges as revolving around threats that social protection systems are at once endangered by and that they are supposed to respond to leads to a potential securitisation of social protection. The Copenhagen School in International Relations (IR) defines an issue as ‘securitised’ when it is threatened in its very existence so that there is demand for exceptional measures to uphold the status quo (Wæver, 1993). The anticipation of increasingly frequent, multidimensional and global crises thus problematises the security function of existing modes of social protection, modifying key design elements, and thereby demands for more wide-ranging changes in their core rationales.

By investigating crises not (just) as an external trigger for policy developments but as an ideational frame that affects policymaking either by serving as legitimisation for policy proposals or by becoming embedded in a policy model’s design, the article exemplifies the multiple functions and effects of futures in policymaking. Futures – not just quantified ones and not just anticipated crises – should be taken (more) seriously as an important part of the ideational framework of policymaking, and crises should not be treated as exogenous variables in the policy environment alone but as potent frames in the construction of policy problems and the design of policy solutions.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

John Berten

Notes

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