Social security or insecurity? Uncertain futures of ecological crisis and the meaning of security

Ecological crises, such as climate change, biodiversity loss and chemical pollution, exert increasing pressure on developed and emerging welfare systems alike, be it through the catastrophic consequences of natural disasters or socially-regressive effects of adaptation policies, to mention but two of the challenges involved. Through a new generation of eco-social policies, policymakers and scholars alike wrestle with how to tackle their environmental and social implications in an integrated way (Hirvilammi et al., 2023). Ecological crises pose a particular problem for social security institutions, which face pressure to maintain their protective function in light of the imperative of adapting to the effects of ecological crises on the one hand and fiscal constraints, policymaking silos or public pushbacks on the other. While changes in social policy have traditionally been traced back to political conflicts and broader socioeconomic transformations, debates on social security in times of ecological crisis seem to be accompanied by another crucial factor, namely a new stage in the problematisation of the future itself: a future seen to be characterised by fundamental uncertainty and unpredictability. This contribution discusses whether the way in which social security in ecological crisis contexts deals with these uncertainties redefines the meaning of security – and what role global social policy could play in addressing its implications.

Social security emerged in the context of crises, being a product of industrialisation and the enormous destitution that it brought in its wake. Consequently, social security is founded on the idea of restoring seemingly lost certainties. The category of uncertainty has thus been at the core of social security (Kaufmann, 2012). The traditional means by which social security has reacted to uncertainties is to tame them by moulding them into the form of ‘risks’. Risk is a key operational term for social security (alongside ‘need’; see Nullmeier, 2024) that comprises transforming vague uncertainties into a more manageable and calculable form – risks that can be expected both individually in a person’s life course and collectively with a certain statistical regularity among a group or population (Ewald, 1991). As a direct or indirect result of ecological crises, the traditional set of risks, such as unemployment, old age or ill health, is complemented by new ones, modified or complicated (Mandelli et al., 2024). However, ecological crises are frequently seen as events that also introduce uncertainties to a new degree (e.g. Sabates-Wheeler et al., 2024), establish new complex risk relationships due to far-reaching societal transformations (Johansson et al., 2016) and are accompanied by definitional problems of the prevalence of these risks and their effects (Hirvilammi et al., 2023), which means that social security systems are put to the test.