Research Question Workshop Series

Online, 2nd till 8th of October 2025:

The WELRISCC partner researchers came together in an internal online workshop series in early October, to discuss the current status and further direction of the research project.

Platform for insights

The progress presentation of every work package demonstrated exciting advances, and allowed for synergies between the work packagesto become clearer. This also provided the basis for exchanging insights into key drivers of welfare states responses to socio-ecological risks, and for discussing possible further collaboration between different research branches within the project. The diverse methodological approaches used by the work packages, ranging from policy process tracing to focus group discourse analysis served as mutual inspiration to all researchers and opened up the possibility for complementary analyses.

First outcomes

Particularly revealing were the contrasts in findings between different welfare states, with substantial differences in public policy, societal perceptions, risk distributions and constructions of vulnerability with regards to socio-ecological risks. Researchers are exploring this with focus on a range of different societally urgent issues such as access to cars and sustainable transport, migrant agricultural workers, farmers subsidies, disaster protection policies or fuel poverty policy.

The discussion following the presentations addressed the analytical framing of national welfare regimes, the policy infrastructure, economic growth strategies as well as societal and political narratives that shape the response to climate change. It is a core aim of the WELRISCC project to systematically describe and analyse which factors shape similarities and differences in welfare responses to the climate crisis.

Preparing for the national case study phase

The workshops concluded with the formulation of several concrete outcomes, including the preparation for the national case study phase of the WELRISCC project. Over the next six months, researchers will conduct national case studies in 16 European countries to gather systematic data to describe and explain variation in welfare state responses to third-generation social risks. Each work package will contribute to the case study framework, which forms a unique collaborative pillar of the WELRISCC research project.  

Given the great success of this internal online workshop series for enhancing the quality of the data and the analytical depth across the project, the work package leaders agreed to hold a follow-up internal online research workshop in January. These will serve as a further platform for knowledge exchange and progress updates across all research strands. The project partners will share their preliminary results with the cooperation and associated partners at the big midterm meeting in April 2026!