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Schedule:
Sunday, January 24, 2027
Union Station 3 & 4 (Hilton San Francisco Union Square)
* noted as presenting author
Background and Purpose
Anthropogenic climate change has intensified extreme weather events, generating new social-ecological risks that demand novel ecosocial protection. In the United States, the ecosocial safety net is anchored by FEMA’s Individual Assistance Program and the National Flood Insurance Program, yet these programs face mounting political pressure toward retrenchment. Building on Hacker’s (2002) framework of the divided welfare state, this study argues that U.S. ecowelfare state is similarly bifurcated between public disaster assistance and private corporate disaster philanthropy. Drawing on critical state theory, we conceptualize this division as a modality through which state and private actors manage competing imperatives of accumulation, legitimation, and ecoregulation. We ask: (1) Is the private ecowelfare state concentrated among elite donors and recipients? (2) Does corporate philanthropy fill gaps left by public assistance, or follow the same flows? (3) Are high-emitting firms more central to disaster philanthropy networks? (4) How does philanthropic distribution relate to county-level social vulnerability and property damage?
Methods
We use a comparative, multi-disaster bipartite network analysis spanning Hurricane Dorian (2019), Hurricane Ida (2021), Hurricanes Ian and Fiona (2022), the Hawaii Wildfires (2023), and Hurricanes Helene and Milton (2024). Corporate philanthropy data were collected from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Corporate Aid Tracker, with firm-to-NGO transfers compiled into directed networks for each disaster-year. NGO characteristics were drawn from the Urban Institute’s 990 E-filer database, and firm-level greenhouse gas emissions from EPA reporting. Public assistance outcomes (FEMA IHP, NFIP) and county-level sociodemographic, damage, and political economy covariates were integrated from OpenFEMA, ACS, SHELDUS, and the UKCPR National Welfare Database. Analyses include network descriptives, Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs), and county-level two-part regression models with state and disaster-year fixed effects.
Results
Preliminary findings suggest that private U.S. ecowelfare is a high-magnitude but opaque system characterized by extreme centralization. Gini coefficients for cash distribution consistently exceed 0.79, with the top 10 recipient NGOs capturing over 93% of observed cash. The donor pool is dominated by large, publicly traded, carbon-intensive firms (mean revenue $40.8 billion; concentrated in industrials and retail), contributing over 87% of total cash. The geography of private relief reveals a double advantage for already-resourced urban hubs: recipient counties are more populous, better resourced, and receive more than double the federal expenditures of non-recipient counties, with 70% geographic overlap between top FEMA and philanthropic recipients. Yet the correlation between philanthropic cash and FEMA expenditures is negligible (r = −0.038), suggesting that U.S. ecowelfare is spatially convergent but functionally decoupled.
Conclusions and Implications
These findings operationalize the divided ecowelfare state as an observable, relational infrastructure, demonstrating that corporate disaster philanthropy functions less as a universalistic safety net and more as a stratified, elite-led system of provision. For social work, these patterns challenge assumptions that private relief compensates for public retrenchment. Instead, private capital follows the state into high-visibility arenas while remaining disconnected. As debates over FEMA reform intensify, understanding these dynamics is critical for advocating universalistic ecosocial protection and ensuring that climate adaptation serves vulnerable populations rather than corporate reputation management.
Anthropogenic climate change has intensified extreme weather events, generating new social-ecological risks that demand novel ecosocial protection. In the United States, the ecosocial safety net is anchored by FEMA’s Individual Assistance Program and the National Flood Insurance Program, yet these programs face mounting political pressure toward retrenchment. Building on Hacker’s (2002) framework of the divided welfare state, this study argues that U.S. ecowelfare state is similarly bifurcated between public disaster assistance and private corporate disaster philanthropy. Drawing on critical state theory, we conceptualize this division as a modality through which state and private actors manage competing imperatives of accumulation, legitimation, and ecoregulation. We ask: (1) Is the private ecowelfare state concentrated among elite donors and recipients? (2) Does corporate philanthropy fill gaps left by public assistance, or follow the same flows? (3) Are high-emitting firms more central to disaster philanthropy networks? (4) How does philanthropic distribution relate to county-level social vulnerability and property damage?
Methods
We use a comparative, multi-disaster bipartite network analysis spanning Hurricane Dorian (2019), Hurricane Ida (2021), Hurricanes Ian and Fiona (2022), the Hawaii Wildfires (2023), and Hurricanes Helene and Milton (2024). Corporate philanthropy data were collected from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Corporate Aid Tracker, with firm-to-NGO transfers compiled into directed networks for each disaster-year. NGO characteristics were drawn from the Urban Institute’s 990 E-filer database, and firm-level greenhouse gas emissions from EPA reporting. Public assistance outcomes (FEMA IHP, NFIP) and county-level sociodemographic, damage, and political economy covariates were integrated from OpenFEMA, ACS, SHELDUS, and the UKCPR National Welfare Database. Analyses include network descriptives, Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs), and county-level two-part regression models with state and disaster-year fixed effects.
Results
Preliminary findings suggest that private U.S. ecowelfare is a high-magnitude but opaque system characterized by extreme centralization. Gini coefficients for cash distribution consistently exceed 0.79, with the top 10 recipient NGOs capturing over 93% of observed cash. The donor pool is dominated by large, publicly traded, carbon-intensive firms (mean revenue $40.8 billion; concentrated in industrials and retail), contributing over 87% of total cash. The geography of private relief reveals a double advantage for already-resourced urban hubs: recipient counties are more populous, better resourced, and receive more than double the federal expenditures of non-recipient counties, with 70% geographic overlap between top FEMA and philanthropic recipients. Yet the correlation between philanthropic cash and FEMA expenditures is negligible (r = −0.038), suggesting that U.S. ecowelfare is spatially convergent but functionally decoupled.
Conclusions and Implications
These findings operationalize the divided ecowelfare state as an observable, relational infrastructure, demonstrating that corporate disaster philanthropy functions less as a universalistic safety net and more as a stratified, elite-led system of provision. For social work, these patterns challenge assumptions that private relief compensates for public retrenchment. Instead, private capital follows the state into high-visibility arenas while remaining disconnected. As debates over FEMA reform intensify, understanding these dynamics is critical for advocating universalistic ecosocial protection and ensuring that climate adaptation serves vulnerable populations rather than corporate reputation management.