Despite the significant influence of localism on policy discourses in the UK in recent decades, there has been limited evidence of any fundamental changes in state-civil society relationships. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 created a new context for cross-sectoral collaboration, as the local Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) and local communities moved to the forefront of the crisis response. This paper draws upon 49 semi-structured interviews with local authorities (LAs) and VCS organisations across England, Scotland and Wales, to explore how the pandemic has reshaped LA-VCS collaboration. Examining the evolution of a range of local collaborative frameworks during the Covid-19 crisis, the article examines what enabled these collaborations to develop, how they operated and what insights can be derived regarding both the conditions for collaboration to flourish and the capacity to sustain this going forward. The findings offer insights into what more progressive forms of collaboration might look like during the transition from crisis and into recovery. It contributes to broader debates about whether the models deployed during Covid-19 represent a pathway to more consensus-based collaboration after a decade of antagonism between civil society and the state.

Despite its significance in determining poverty risk, family size has received little focus in recent social policy analysis. This paper provides a correction, focusing squarely on the changing poverty risk of larger families (those with three or more dependent children) in the UK over recent years. It argues that we need to pay much closer attention to how and why poverty risk differs according to family size. Our analysis of Family Resource Survey data reveals how far changes in child poverty rates since 1997 – both falling poverty risk to 2012/13 and increases since then – have been concentrated in larger families. Social security changes are identified as central: these have affected larger families most as they have greater need for support, due to both lower work intensity and higher household needs. By interrogating the way policy change has affected families of different sizes the paper seeks to increase understanding of the effects of different poverty reduction strategies, with implications for policy debates in the UK and beyond. In providing evidence about the socio-demographics of larger families and their changing poverty risk it also aims to inform contested debates about the state’s role in providing financial support for children.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected working women’s well-being in different ways due to contrasting national responses. This article focuses on the specific context of Singapore, which implemented differentiated rules for workers: essential workers continued to report to workplaces, while non-essential workers were required to work from home. This policy had far-reaching implications for working women, who are more likely than husbands to juggle paid work and household duties. The article uses longitudinal data collected in 2018 and during the pandemic in 2020, specifically during Singapore’s lockdown period, to measure changes in 287 working women’s self-reported levels of stress, fatigue, and quality of interpersonal relationships by essential worker status. While all workers were affected by the pandemic, female essential workers were more likely than their non-essential peers to report declines in stress levels from 2018 to 2020, and less likely to report changes in spousal relationships, both positive and negative. Findings suggest that the differences were driven by exposure to quarantine conditions faced by non-essential workers. Our results highlight the importance of policies supporting frontline workers and more gender-equitable labour market policies to support married women juggling the twin demands of employment and household responsibilities.

This article investigates the unique contribution of specific programme characteristics together with personal stigma, stigmatisation by the public, and claims stigma, to the non-take-up of targeted income support among Hong Kong older adults. Drawing on data from a sample of 3,299 Hong Kong older adults aged 65 or above, we find that between 11-14 per cent of eligible participants did not receive cash transfers from Normal and Higher Old Age Living Allowance (OALA) and old-age Comprehensive Social Security Assistance (old-age CSSA). By combining mainstream economic analysis with attempts to quantify welfare stigma (Baumberg, 2016) we find that transaction costs were most consistently and strongly related to non-take-up of targeted income support; non-take-up of old-age CSSA and Higher OALA but not Normal OALA varied with welfare stigma after controlling for personal and household characteristics of study participants. This article further adds to the literature by examining the effect of recent reforms to asset- and means-tested benefits for the same target population of older adults on take-up in the East Asian context. The article suggests that automatic switching of beneficiaries from Normal OALA to Higher OALA effectively facilitated higher take-up of the latter. The policy implications of these various findings are discussed.

Philanthropic foundations are important agents of global policy transfer. While scholars have explored foundations’ policy roles in a range of contexts, we know relatively little about how they transfer policies and instigate institutional change under rigid authoritarianism – fields in which the state maintains centralized control and excludes other actors. This paper seeks to bridge this gap through analysis of a case study of the Ford Foundation’s grantmaking in the Chinese family planning field during a period of rigid authoritarian control (1991-2005). We find the Foundation stimulated the transfer of the Western “reproductive health” policy through two mechanisms: 1) incentivising elite researchers to conduct scientific research on rural women that was previously left “undone”; and 2) partnering with peripheral state actors for localised experimentations and gradually gaining access to central policymakers to encourage national policy innovation. We also discuss the contingencies and ambivalences of the Foundation’s influence under rigid authoritarianism.

Concerns about the unintended effects of marketised public employment services are increasingly expressed because there is mounting evidence that such services are frequently characterised by various gaming practices on the part of their providers. To prevent these unintended consequences, payment-by-result approaches have been progressively strengthened.

The aim of the research reported in this article was to investigate the extent to which such approaches are able to make service providers accountable for client outcomes. The study used two Italian regional cases in order to compare different and alternative contracting arrangements: Lombardy (outcome-based payments), and Emilia-Romagna (fixed payments). Drawing on rich administrative databases, the analysis relied on a quantitative methodology based on propensity score matching and logistic regressions. Even if outcome-based contracting can make service providers financially accountable for the service outcome, the results of the analysis show that it does not sufficiently prevent gaming practices, resulting in inequity among the services provided.

This paper provides a detailed overview of how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the income of charitable organisations – an under-researched theme within social policy, which thus far has largely focused on the impact of the pandemic on individuals’ and households’ wellbeing. It analyses a unique longitudinal dataset that follows through time c.90,000 charities in England and Wales. The results, for the first time, illustrate the scale of the pandemic’s financial impact on the charitable sector: the median charity experienced a 13% real decline in annual income, while a charity at the 25th percentile of the annual relative growth distribution experienced an income decline of 43%. Importantly these annual declines are much more sizeable than those associated with the Great Recession and subsequent period of public spending austerity. Smaller charities, particularly those with an income under £100k, have been most significantly affected. The declines have been pervasive, extending across most fields of charitable activity, though certain charitable fields have seen particularly acute declines. While there has rightly been considerable emphasis on the important role of voluntary action in responding to the pandemic, this new empirical evidence helps to communicate the extent of the recent challenges faced by the charitable sector.

This paper investigates which factors shape popular support for the taxation of wealth in Germany, a country with one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in Western Europe. Although public support for progressive taxation in general is strong, no tax on personal net wealth is currently levied. Against this backdrop, we ask how objective and subjective self-interest, information about wealth inequality and deservingness valuations regarding the wealthy affect popular support for a personal wealth tax. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between self-interest and deservingness. Using original survey data and a vignette design, we find that subjective self-interest is more important than objective self-interest, and that providing information on aggregate wealth inequality can shift the attitudes of those who are otherwise indifferent in favour of wealth taxation. Furthermore, deservingness valuations impact support for taxation in important ways. Factors indicating meritocratic wealth accumulation reduce support, and this is especially pronounced among low-status respondents. By contrast, while non-meritocratic factors increase support for taxation, these effects are largely off-set in privileged groups. Altogether, these findings suggest that self-interest and deservingness valuations impact attitudes towards wealth taxation in opposing directions, and that providing information to those otherwise indifferent might increase redistributive preferences.