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

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.