This study examines the development of anti-domestic-violence policy implementation in an emerging democracy, the country of Georgia. We applied a public policy framework – Contextual Interaction Theory (CIT) – which enabled us to thoroughly examine factors contributing to drawbacks in anti-domestic-violence policy implementation. The CIT framework was enriched by expanding it to the scale of the national anti-domestic-violence policy and placing greater emphasis on the victim. The qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews and media reveals that public policy implementers lack motivation, information and power to be able to really implement the anti-domestic-violence policy. The CIT analysis of domestic violence (DV) policies demonstrates that DV problems are further exacerbated by the contextual factors of societal attitudes in terms of gender inequality and social acceptance of DV, which creates unfavorable context for the realisation of the anti-DV policy. In such circumstances, according to the CIT, only symbolic realisation of a policy takes place. The use of CIT as a tool for the implementation of a policy will provide substantial input into its realisation. Based on this theory, it is crucial to increase information, motivation and power of implementers, as well as change the context for the anti-DV policy to be actually implemented.

This paper addresses policy change in Britain since 2010 across the three fields of domestic welfare, migration and asylum, and analyses the association between welfare, conditionality and control through the lens of civic stratification. Drawing on the work of Richard Munch and Mary Douglas, it moves beyond existing literature in this area to show that the more complex the classification in play, and the more severe its boundary implications, the more likely the emergence of contestable margins. Informed by Munch's ‘battlefield’ approach, it provides a discussion of contestable margins in each of the three policy fields and outlines the nature and source of challenges that emerge within the ‘institutional battlefield’. A concluding section reflects on what is revealed by viewing welfare, migration and asylum within the same conceptual frame, identifying an emergent welfare paradigm that displays recurrent problems across all three fields.

The discourse of deservingness has been mobilised against certain groups in the UK society navigating UK labour markets, among them refugees and asylum seekers. These discourses, leading to the stigmatisation of the unemployed are coupled with an emphasis on the importance of individuals taking responsibility to develop their ‘employability’. Little attention has been paid to scrutinise the contrast between the deservingness rhetoric and policy making with the actual conditions newcomers, and in particular refugees and asylum seekers, are confronted with when seeking employment. Our paper fills such a gap by indicating key contradictions at the heart of labour market integration in the UK. On the one hand, the emphasis on deservingness is coupled with policy discourses that construct an environment shaped by welfare and labour market chauvinism. On the other hand, the policy architecture is fundamentally flawed in a number of ways in terms of the support mechanisms necessary to ensure that newcomers can successfully integrate into the labour market.

The reforms of the welfare system under the 1945 Labour government are usually regarded as fundamental in creating the post-war welfare state. Yet, measured by their financial implications, and viewed in comparison with either pre-war Britain or other Western European countries in the same period, these reforms appear strikingly limited. Far from bringing a ‘New Jerusalem’, the 1940s reforms seem to have brought into being an austere, minimalist structure of welfare provision. The reasons for this are examined, especially the forces shaping the new social security system. It is argued that the combination of the Labour government's economic priorities, its acceptance of the Beveridge legacy and the Treasury pressure to limit the Exchequer's financial contribution to the new system, led to this austerity.

The vetting and barring scheme known as the POVA (Protection of Vulnerable Adults) List established in England and Wales by the Care Standards Act (2000) was intended to provide greater assurance about the quality of social care for adults. This article discusses referrals to the POVA List in the period 21 May 2004 to 17 November 2006, details of which were made available to the researchers. These comprised 5,294 cases. Further data relating to the investigation process were provided through drawing on all material supplied in a purposively selected sample of 298 referrals. These have been analysed and findings are reported here in respect of referrals and prior disciplinary action, interactions with local and national agencies and the involvement of the police. What happened to the referrals and the length of time for decisions about Listing are also reported. The article concludes with some policy recommendations for the future of the scheme and sets this in the context of regulation.

Much of social policy involves a redistribution of resources. Such redistributive interferences with the market are often said to sacrifice freedom for the sake of competing goods such as humanity or social justice. The thesis of this paper is that this simple opposition of freedom and redistribution is mistaken. If freedom is defined empirically, redistributive transfers cannot simply remove freedom but must either transfer freedom from some to others or leave it unaffected. If freedom is defined normatively, it may be opposed to redistribution but that opposition then rests upon the value that gives freedom its meaning and not upon freedom as an autonomous value.

Neoliberal governance has been associated with rising inequality and economic exclusion. Recent scholarship proposes that the social investment state (SIS) is a turn away from such inequality and exclusion-enhancing neoliberalism. The ideal SIS responds to neoliberalism-generated social ills by investing in the productive capacities of all its citizens. However, commentators ask whether an SIS addresses the plight of weaker elements in society, specifically that of disadvantaged ethnic minorities. This paper looks specifically at this question by utilising a critical-case study research design of a surprising example of social investment in disadvantaged ethnic minorities: the extensive labour market policies for Israeli Arabs. This paper introduces the concept of a neoliberal targeted SIS in which social investment programmes are developed for economic reasons, promoted by neoliberal actors (right-wing parties and Ministries of Finance), target narrow groups instead of being applied to all, and the preferred mode for the delivery of services is private. Egalitarian outcomes – to the extent that they materialise – might be thought of as a policy by-product.

This study examines the effects of an old-age allowance programme in Taiwan, the Senior Citizens Welfare Living Allowance (SCWLA), on intergenerational financial transfers, living arrangements and contact, as well as the heterogeneity of its effects by adult children’s five types of motives for giving: altruism, exchange, reciprocity, affection, and sense of responsibility. Using 2002, 2004, 2005 and 2006 data from the Panel Study of Family Dynamics, we employed a difference-in-difference individual fixed effect model to compare the outcomes across the treatment (aged 65 and older) and comparison groups (aged 55 to 64) before and after the introduction of SCWLA. Our results indicate that SCWLA crowds in intergenerational contact but does not significantly change financial transfers and co-residence patterns. The increase in intergenerational contact is primarily driven by adult children having lower motives for giving. This suggests that old-age allowances may reduce financial entanglement between adult children and older parents and change the social norm by raising “low motivators’” awareness, respect and concern for elderly. Providing public transfer to the elderly should not be hampered by the fear of distorting family support functions.

Outcomes Based Commissioning (OBC) – for example, Pay for Success (in the US) or Payment by Results (in the UK) – has been suggested as a way to provide ‘more’ social services for ‘less’ public resources. Such commissioning is often linked with an innovative financing tool called a Social Impact Bond (SIB). Using data from the Social Finance UK Database and focusing on SIBs in the US and UK, we evaluate whether the SIB approach aligns with the theoretical predictions of social innovation. The results provide limited evidence that SIBs facilitate capital injections from the private sector into the production of social goods as well as facilitate parts of the process of social innovation – namely, piloting and scaling. We conclude that there is significant variation, both between the US and UK and within the US, in social innovation ecosystems and the role played by SIBs.

This article analyses the design and implementation process of arrangements for health care provision and access to health care in Cambodia. It points to the complexity of shaping a coherent social policy in a low-income country heavily dependent on international aid.

At a theoretical level, we confirm that ideas, interests and institutions are all important factors in the construction of Cambodian health care schemes. However, we demonstrate that trying to hierarchically organise these three elements to explain policy making is not fruitful.

Regarding the methodology, interviews with forty-eight selected participants produced the qualitative material for this study. A documentary review was also an important source of data and information.

The study produces two sets of results. First, Cambodian policy aimed at the development of health care arrangements results from a series of negotiations between a wide range of stakeholders with different objectives and interests. International stakeholders, such as donors and technical organisations, are major players in the policy arena where health policy is constructed. Cambodian civil society, however, is rarely involved in the negotiations.

Second, the Cambodian government makes political decisions incrementally. The long-term vision of the Cambodian authorities for improving health care provision and access is quite clear, but, nevertheless, day-to-day decisions and actions are constantly negotiated between stakeholders. As a result, donors and non-government organisations (NGOs) working in the field find it difficult to anticipate policies.

To conclude, despite real autonomy in the decision-making process, the Cambodian government still has to prove its capacity to master a number of risks, such as the (so far under-regulated) development of the private health care sector.

Welfare-to-work programmes have a contested normative foundation. Critics argue that ‘citizen responsibility’ is being promoted to the sacrifice of more important social values, such as solidarity and fairness. This paper seeks to recapture what is valuable in citizen responsibility and to challenge the idea that the concept is intrinsically bound up with detrimental policy strategies. The paper develops a view of the responsible citizen as an appropriate addressee of moral expectations. This view highlights how addressing someone as responsible involves a presumption of reasonableness. Thereafter, the view is applied to conditions of street-level interaction, the design of policy instruments, and political discourse.

Contemporary welfare policies in many Western countries limit public assistance for the long-term unemployed and spur rapid movement into the labour market. These policies have substantially changed the trade-offs of employment and welfare-use behaviour, making employment far more attractive than welfare dependency. Despite this new reality, many welfare recipients circulate in and out of the welfare system and the low-wage labour market or become disconnected from both work and welfare. Drawing on longitudinal administrative data of single Israeli mothers who received Income Support Benefit in 2003, this study focuses on the role of structural factors, including local labour market conditions and local availability of subsidised child-care, in explaining the intensity of welfare receipt over a 51-month period. The results indicate notable diversity in welfare-use accumulation. Some mothers were classified as short- to mid-termer recipients while others showed a much more intensive use, and about a third were classified as chronically dependent. Local labour market conditions and their change over time played an important part in explaining welfare accumulation, while local child-care availability had no effect. Implications for policy are discussed.

This is a study of the prevailing state pension systems in Britain and the US in the context of a philosophy of welfare that has developed over the last decade. In this philosophy state welfare systems are justified in terms of their maximizing liberty and autonomy rather than merely social justice. It is argued that the state earnings-related pension scheme in Britain and social security in the US, because they are ‘unfunded’ and paid for out of current taxation, are not merely inefficient but also reduce the independence of individuals and impose high burdens on future generations. It is argued that no philosophical justification can be given for this imposition. The major theoretical flaw in state-managed pension arrangements, it is claimed, is the confusion of the welfare principle with the insurance principle.

A decline in the number of young people entering the UK labour force has led to growing interest in the recruitment and retention of women workers. As yet the child care needs of school age children have not been addressed. Using interview data the strategies mothers employ to meet their work commitments outside of school hours and during childhood illnesses are described. Although mothers remained the main carers of their children, they frequently depended on unpaid help from relatives. These informal arrangements were sometimes complicated and potentially vulnerable. This dependence on informal support networks has a range of policy implications.

In a world of nation states, citizenship, or full membership of the social and political community, has a three-fold relationship to the supply and demand of public welfare. First, in the liberal tradition that society exists to serve its members, citizenship offers moral justification for the state's concern for individual citizens (Harris, 1987; Jordan, 1989). Second, since citizenship confers a form of equality of status on members of the community (Marshall, 1963), it must be assumed that the state university applies to these members whatever distributive standards it adopts (Macedo, 1990). Finally, and as a consequence of the other two relationships, citizenship is one of the primary bases for claims on the economic resources of the state (King & Waldron, 1988; Barry, 1990, p. 4).

During the years following the Boer War, infant mortality became an issue of national importance, and increasing emphasis was placed on the provision of infant welfare clinics and health visitors. The infant mortality rate declined steadily throughout the period, and officials attributed the improvement to the new services. But just as the causes of infant mortality were complex, so were the reasons for the decline in the mortality rate. What needs explanation therefore is why health officials concentrated so exclusively on one particular form of solution. It is argued that this was a consequence of, first, the way in which infant welfare was perceived as a problem of mortality and especially as a problem of diarrhoeal mortality and, secondly, the philosophy of the infant welfare movement, which held that responsibility for infant mortality rested with the individual mother. Infant welfare services were thus compartmentalized as a set of personal social services, and kept separate from broader socio-economic issues.

The article emphasises the urgent need for a reconsideration of potential sources of income for the National Health Service which could supplement rather than replace those from general taxation. They include local taxation, earmarked taxes, patient charges (hotel, prescription and other charges for non-clinical items), a lottery, income generation, charitable donations and patient ‘opting out’ of the NHS with private insurance. Analysis is set within the position statement provided by the 1989 White Paper Working for Patients and within a more general analytical framework paying attention to equity, accountability, value for money, management incentives and other criteria.

Each funding method is considered in terms of its consistency with the criteria of both the analytical framework and the White Paper. The differences between some of the alternative sources are found to be more apparent than real. Rather than providing a panacea for the perceived funding and rationing problems of the NHS, the danger is that new supplementary sources of finance may simply replace one set of problems with another. The new set may pose even more intractable problems and involve considerable short to medium term disruption of NHS finances. The inescapable fact is that decisions about the levels and quality of public service provision and their financing are ultimately matters of democratic accountability, decisions which cannot and should not be sidestepped by the convenience of income sources.

Social services in China nowadays are increasingly coproduced by both government and non-profit organizations (NPOs). However, we still know little about how NPOs perceive their government partners in social service delivery. Using a Q methodology, this study remedies this gap and identifies three profiles – namely, government as a distant facilitator, government as a hands-off collaborator, and government as a prudent principal. Also, it has been found that two conditions – namely, NPOs’ development stage and funding resources – influence their perceptions on government in social service delivery. These three profiles provide new insights into NPOs’ perceptions of their government partners in social service delivery, and they add new building blocks to existing literature, specifically on the government–NPO relationship in China.