Resilience and Adaptability of Welfare States In Times of Polycrisis: Poverty and Inequality Under Pressure

Recent years have seen renewed attention to the concept of polycrisis, understood as the interaction and mutual reinforcement of multiple crises (Morin and Kern 1993). From the global financial crisis to the COVID‑19 pandemic and the recent inflationary and energy shocks, welfare states are increasingly required to respond to overlapping and compound disruptions (Ebbinghaus and Nelson 2025). This raises fundamental questions about their capacity to protect living standards and prevent poverty.

This open session invites contributions that examine the resilience and adaptability of welfare states in such contexts, with a focus on poverty and inequality outcomes. Building on literature that conceptualises welfare state resilience as the capacity to absorb, adjust, and transform in response to shocks (Starke et al. 2014; Eichhorst et al. 2024; Pereirinha and Pereira 2021), we distinguish between institutionally embedded resilience – grounded in automatic stabilisers and policy legacies (Soon et al. 2021; Van Hooren et al. 2014) – and resilience via policy adaptation and reform (Farnsworth and Irving 2011; Hemerijck 2013). Two separate reform logics which may yield distinct distributional outcomes.

The current polycrisis context provides a unique opportunity to reassess these dynamics: do crisis responses mitigate or reinforce existing inequalities? Are improvements in poverty driven by structural features or by discretionary measures, and to what extent do they signal longer-term welfare state transformations? We particularly welcome contributions addressing these questions through comparative, longitudinal, or case-based analyses, including work on the implications of polycrisis governance for inequality, and its distributional consequences across social groups and households.