Sebastian Thorp

After Beveridge: Reimagining Welfare for Scotland's Climate Futures

Social security systems were designed for environmental stability, yet policy discourse continues to treat climate adaptation and welfare provision as separate domains, concealing how climate change reshapes vulnerability itself (Gough, 2016; Koch, 2022). Policy studies, economics, and social policy have diagnosed this gap, but their analytical orientation offers few resources for proposing alternative welfare models capable of anticipating, rather than reacting to, climate futures. Design contributes what these disciplines, by orientation, do not. It offers methods for making plural futures concrete, contestable, and open to prototyping.
Drawing on interviews with Social Security Scotland practitioners (n=11), this paper deploys Causal Layered Analysis (Inayatullah, 2004) as a design method. CLA is used not only to expose critical gaps between the anticipatory logic climate adaptation requires and the reactive architecture of existing welfare systems, but also to surface the metaphors and worldviews that hold current arrangements in place. Practitioners described encountering climate-vulnerable claimants whose needs fall between benefit categories, developing informal workarounds when official frameworks proved inadequate, and experiencing ethical tensions between policy requirements and their professional judgment.
I then apply Dator's four futures (Continued Growth, Collapse, Discipline, Transformation) across CLA's layers as a propositional device, treating each future as a brief for articulating a distinct welfare model rather than a forecast of likelihood. Through this designedly use of futures methods, the paper proposes reconceptualising welfare's temporal orientation from 'safety net' to 'adaptive infrastructure'. This is a move that other disciplines can argue for but that design is positioned to make visible and test.