There is something deeply unsettling about the frequency with which people across the world are taking to the streets. From farmers protesting in Europe to young people challenging political establishments in South Asia, from demonstrations over living costs to movements demanding democratic accountability, the grievances differ, but a larger question connects them. Why are so many societies struggling to manage the pressures building within them?
Protest is hardly a new political phenomenon. It has helped secure voting rights, improve working conditions, challenge discrimination and hold governments accountable. What deserves closer examination today is the accumulation of pressures that makes protest increasingly recurrent, and the apparent inability of political institutions to address the conditions from which discontent emerges.
We have become remarkably capable of identifying economic risks, forecasting technological disruptions and modelling environmental crises. Yet we remain much less capable of anticipating their social consequences. Governments measure inflation, productivity, investment and growth. They are less effective at measuring the erosion of trust, the loss of economic security or the growing distance between citizens and the institutions that govern them.
This is perhaps the defining contradiction of contemporary development. Our capacity to transform economies has expanded faster than our capacity to protect societies from the consequences of that transformation.
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The pressures we have failed to manage
Consider the transformations taking place simultaneously.
Artificial intelligence promises extraordinary improvements in productivity, scientific discovery and economic efficiency. But it also raises questions about the future of work, the distribution of income and the concentration of economic power. The anxiety surrounding AI is not simply that machines may replace human labour. It is that the benefits of technological progress may accrue to a relatively small number of firms and individuals, while the costs of adjustment are distributed across millions of workers.
Climate change presents a different, but equally profound, challenge. Floods, droughts, heatwaves and changing agricultural conditions threaten livelihoods, infrastructure and public health. Meanwhile, the transition towards cleaner energy systems is itself reorganising industries, investment and employment. Workers in carbon-intensive sectors face uncertain futures, while communities dependent on these industries must contend with the possibility of economic decline.
Neither AI nor climate change necessarily produces political instability. Both, however, can act as multipliers of existing social pressures. Their effects are filtered through inequalities in wealth, access to education, labour-market protection, public infrastructure and political representation.
A farmer facing declining yields, a graduate struggling to secure employment and a factory worker concerned about automation may appear to inhabit different economic worlds. Yet each confronts a similar uncertainty: whether the institutions responsible for managing change can still offer a credible future.
These anxieties become more politically consequential when they interact with longstanding grievances over corruption, unequal opportunity, exclusion and declining public services.
What begins as an economic problem can become a crisis of institutional legitimacy.
Why growth alone cannot repair society
For decades, the dominant response to social pressures has been to promise more growth. Expand investment, increase productivity, attract industries and create employment. These objectives remain indispensable. But growth is not a substitute for the political work of deciding who benefits, who bears the costs and who has a voice in shaping economic change.
An economy can grow while particular regions decline. Technological industries can flourish while young graduates struggle to enter the labour market. Governments can attract substantial investment while communities experience deteriorating public services.
These outcomes are not necessarily evidence that growth has failed. They demonstrate that its benefits are mediated by institutions, bargaining power and public policy.
The political economist Karl Polanyi recognised a related tension in his account of market society. Economic transformation does not occur independently of social relations. When markets reorganise livelihoods without sufficient social protection, societies generate demands for security and political intervention.
That insight is particularly relevant today. The pace of technological and environmental change is accelerating, but the institutions that mediate its social consequences have not necessarily evolved at the same speed.
Education systems are often poorly connected to emerging labour-market needs. Social protection remains tied to employment arrangements that are becoming less secure. Regional development policies struggle to respond to industrial decline. Public consultation frequently takes place after important economic decisions have already been made.
The consequence is a growing mismatch between the speed of change and the capacity for collective adjustment.
We should therefore be cautious about treating every protest as an isolated political disturbance. Some arise from immediate policy decisions; others reflect accumulated grievances that have gone unresolved for years.
A government may withdraw a controversial measure and still find that public anger persists. The policy may have triggered the protest, but it did not necessarily create the underlying distrust.
The institutional question
The strength of a state is often judged by its ability to enforce laws, maintain order, mobilise resources and implement decisions. These capabilities matter. Without them, governments cannot deliver infrastructure, respond to disasters or protect citizens.
But institutional strength has another dimension that receives insufficient attention: the ability to recognise social grievances, mediate competing interests and correct policy failures before they become political crises.
A state that can build highways but cannot hear the communities displaced by them possesses an incomplete form of capacity. A government that can attract advanced industries but cannot support workers displaced by technological change faces a similar limitation.
Strong institutions are not simply those that implement decisions efficiently. They are also those that can revise decisions legitimately.
This distinction matters because contemporary governments face increasingly difficult trade-offs. Climate mitigation may impose costs on particular industries. Fiscal reforms can generate opposition from groups dependent on public subsidies. Technological upgrading can threaten existing employment even when it improves national competitiveness.
There will rarely be a policy that satisfies everyone.
The question is whether societies possess credible mechanisms through which these conflicts can be negotiated.
Independent courts, accountable administrations, representative legislatures, local governments, trade unions, professional associations and civil society organisations all have roles to play. Their functions differ, but collectively they help convert competing social demands into political decisions.
When these institutions weaken, disagreements that might otherwise be negotiated become more confrontational. Citizens may come to believe that public demonstrations are the only remaining means of securing attention.
Protest, in this sense, can be both an expression of democratic vitality and a warning that ordinary channels of representation are proving inadequate.
The appropriate response is neither to romanticise every protest nor to regard dissent as an obstacle to development. Protest movements can themselves contain competing interests, misinformation and demands that are difficult to reconcile. But dismissing them without addressing legitimate grievances risks deepening the very instability governments seek to contain.
A mature political system must be capable of distinguishing between disagreement, disorder and genuine threats to public safety without treating them as interchangeable.
Social repair as a development priority
What, then, would it mean to place social repair at the centre of public policy?
The term should not be confused with an appeal for social harmony or a return to some imagined period of consensus. Societies have always contained conflicts over resources, identity, power and opportunity.
Social repair means rebuilding the institutional arrangements through which these conflicts can be addressed fairly, peacefully and productively.
It requires at least four changes.
First, social consequences must become part of economic policy design, rather than an afterthought.
Governments routinely assess the fiscal and commercial viability of major projects. They should apply comparable seriousness to evaluating employment displacement, regional inequality, community vulnerability and the distribution of adjustment costs.
An industrial policy that subsidises new technologies should also establish obligations concerning workforce development, local suppliers and affected communities. Public support for economic transformation must be accompanied by public responsibility for its consequences.
Second, participation must begin before decisions are finalised.
Consultation often functions as a procedural exercise in which citizens are invited to comment on policies whose central features have already been determined.
A more meaningful approach would involve workers, communities, businesses and local governments in identifying problems and designing solutions from the outset.
This is not an argument for giving every interest group a veto. It is an argument for improving the information available to policymakers and creating legitimate mechanisms for negotiating trade-offs.
Participation can make reform more difficult in the short term. But exclusion can make its implementation far more costly over time.
Third, governments must develop institutions for continuous social adjustment.
AI and climate change are not one-off disruptions. Their consequences will unfold over decades, across sectors and regions, often in ways that cannot be predicted precisely.
One-time compensation packages or temporary retraining schemes will therefore be insufficient.
Countries need durable arrangements connecting labour-market intelligence, vocational education, social protection and regional investment. Workers should be able to move between industries without bearing the full financial and personal costs of economic restructuring.
The objective should not be to preserve every existing job. It should be to ensure that losing a job does not mean losing one’s place in society.
Fourth, institutional accountability must become more accessible.
Citizens should not have to organise mass demonstrations to obtain an explanation for an administrative decision, correct an error or challenge an unfair outcome.
Accessible grievance mechanisms, transparent administrative procedures, independent oversight and timely judicial remedies are essential forms of social infrastructure.
Their value is often invisible when they function effectively. It becomes unmistakable when they fail.
A new measure of state capacity
These reforms point towards a broader reconsideration of how we understand successful governance.
For much of the contemporary development debate, state capacity has been associated with the ability to mobilise capital, coordinate industries, build infrastructure and deliver economic transformation.
The next generation of institutional reform must retain these capabilities while adding another: the capacity to absorb and mediate social pressures without allowing them to become systemic crises.
This requires more than efficient bureaucracy. It demands institutional learning.
Governments need to understand why certain policies generate resistance, why particular communities distrust official assurances and why apparently successful reforms produce unexpected forms of exclusion.
They must also be willing to recognise that citizens possess knowledge that cannot always be captured through economic models or administrative datasets.
A worker understands the insecurity of an industrial transition in ways that an investment forecast cannot. A farming community understands the consequences of environmental change through lived experience that may not be visible in national statistics.
Neither perspective should automatically determine policy. Both should inform it.
Institutional strength ultimately depends on the ability to combine technical expertise with democratic responsiveness.
There is also an important international dimension. AI, climate change, migration and supply-chain restructuring increasingly cross national boundaries, while the institutions responsible for managing their social consequences remain overwhelmingly domestic.
Countries with limited fiscal capacity may face the greatest adjustment burdens. International cooperation must therefore move beyond financing technological solutions to supporting the institutions, skills and social protections needed to make economic transitions politically sustainable.
From managing unrest to rebuilding trust
The temptation in periods of widespread protest is to search for immediate stability. Governments seek to restore order, reassure investors and return political attention to economic priorities.
These responses may be necessary, particularly when demonstrations become violent. But stability achieved without addressing underlying grievances is often temporary.
Trust cannot be commanded into existence. It is built through repeated experiences of fairness, competence, accountability and institutional responsiveness.
A citizen whose grievance is heard, whose rights are protected and whose economic future is treated as a legitimate public concern has stronger reasons to trust the political system, even when they disagree with a particular decision.
That is why social repair should not be treated as a secondary welfare objective. It is a condition for sustaining economic transformation itself.
Countries will need to undertake difficult reforms in the coming decades. They must decarbonise industries, adapt to new technologies, restructure labour markets and respond to increasingly severe environmental pressures.
The success of these reforms will depend not only on financial resources or technological capabilities, but on whether societies consider the burdens of change legitimate and fairly distributed.
The world does not suffer from a shortage of ambitions for transformation. Governments have industrial strategies, climate targets, digital agendas and national development visions. What remains underdeveloped is the institutional architecture for helping people live through the changes these ambitions produce.
Perhaps this is what the age of protest is telling us.
People are not necessarily rejecting change. Many are asking whether they will have a place in the future being built around them.
The central political challenge of our time is therefore not how to make societies more accepting of disruption. It is how to make transformation more socially accountable.
A strong state can change an economy. A resilient society must be able to shape that change. The task ahead is to build institutions capable of doing both.
Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed in this article/column are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of South Asian Herald.
