In the Netherlands, the generic work-first support seems unable to mitigate the scarring effects of prior unemployment on ethnic minorities’ careers. This study compares the impact of vulnerable ethnic minorities participating in an alternative employer-based employment programme with a control group entitled to work-first support on employment up to ten years later. We look at how both labour market interventions with different time horizon strategies may close the employment gap with the regular labour force. Results indicate that programme participants from (non-)western groups achieve higher levels of (competitive) employment than the control group, but the programme’s impact is negligible for the most established ethnic groups. The improved short-term wage match can partially explain the additional programme effect when considering the different time horizon strategies. Our results call for more employer-based programmes providing vulnerable ethnic minorities with the desired skills for better employment prospects, e.g. skill-shortage jobs.

The goal of this study was to examine the effect of a social pension programme for older adults in South Korea, Basic Pension Scheme (BPS) on material hardship and subjective well-being. We apply a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to estimate the effect of the BPS on the material hardship and life satisfaction of older people between the ages of sixty-one and sixty-eight. Data come from Korea Welfare Panel Study (KOWEPS) wave 12 survey (2017, N = 3,932). The BPS benefit reduces the risks of housing hardship, bill payment delay and food insecurity. Interestingly, while the effect sizes of the BPS on mitigating the material hardship increase as income decreases, the lower-income groups were less satisfied with the pension provision than middle- and upper-income groups. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on material hardship for older adults in an Asian country facing persistent old-age poverty and immature public pensions.

Both literature and public policy on work inclusion has shifted towards the demand-side, which recognises that employer engagement is crucial to increase labour market participation and sustained employment for vulnerable groups. Research shows, however, that the implemented demand-side policies have been less than effective. This opens a discussion about barriers to implementation in terms of relevant employer characteristics. By use of Norwegian register data, this article estimates the impact of employer size and extent of implemented disability policies on probability of sustaining employment for workers with reduced capacity, finding that employer size negatively impacts probability of sustaining employment. Extent of implemented disability policies positively impacts probability of sustaining employment, irrespective of employer size. I argue that systematically considering these characteristics can help identify how and where to improve the position of workers with reduced capacity and discuss the implications for public policy.

Family and community care work – mentoring, feeding, and nurturing – is a critical activity in any society. It is, and it enables, productive and reproductive acts that hold society together and enable economies to function. Its importance is magnified for people with low income in that their economic options, outside the home, are more limited than for people with higher incomes. We conducted a year-long financial diaries project with twenty-eight mainly low-income Canadians and found that care work was critically important for them and their families and communities. However, we found that this work was often stigmatised: it is not well paid (if at all;, it involves costs to the provider; and it can lead people to become dependent on predatory loans. We argue that Canadian social policy must broaden its conception of care work and expand support for persons, particularly women, who have older children, and community commitments.

Understanding the interaction between child labour and schooling in rural and urban areas in Ghana is essential to implement the most appropriate intervention. I aimed to establish parental perceptions of the extent child labour interferes with schooling in rural and urban areas in Ghana. The participants recruited were from Ghana purposively sampled across rural areas (Ankaase, Anwiankwanta and Kensere), and urban areas (Jamestown, Korle Gonno and Chorkor) amongst sixty government officials, NGO representatives, and both parents whose children were and were not involved in child labour. The research utilises semi-structured interviews conducted with parents (ten), stakeholders (ten), focus groups (thirty); and participant observation techniques (ten) utilised to gather the needed data. Interviews were recorded, transcribed utilising a framework approach as the data analysis method. This article finds that the child labour in the rural areas is not always inconsistent with school attendance while, in the urban area, the two activities are incompatible.

This case study investigates strategies used by the NGO Leonard Cheshire Disability Zimbabwe (LCDZ) to promote the SRHRs of girls and young women with disabilities in Zimbabwe. The findings show that LCDZ employed a combination of six strategies. These are: (1) building practical knowledge on SRHRs; (2) increasing community awareness and sensitivity; (3) providing SRHRs-related education; (4) enhancing access to justice and related services for survivors of sexual violence; (5) delivering assistive devices; and (6) promoting the livelihoods and economic empowerment. LCDZ made use of multi-stakeholder partnerships to implement these strategies, leveraging complementary skills and experience in the promotion of SRHRs. In each of these strategies, girls and young women with disabilities are the target group, with other stakeholders brought together to support them.

More than one in ten Australians live in poverty, with many relying on government provided support and emergency payments. These payments are insufficient to cover basic costs of living, and as a result, many people are forced to engage with emergency and community food assistance. The aim of this article is to explore the experiences of those who, despite being in receipt of an Australian welfare payment and engaged with the welfare system, rely on charitable food assistance for some or all of their weekly food supply. Interviews were conducted with seventy-eight people and were thematically analysed. The main findings of this study are the significant challenges faced by people who are on very low incomes when navigating the government-provided welfare and non-government charity systems and the insufficiency of the welfare system in providing income to meet basic costs of living.

Established theories of social policy development, such as industrialisation and power resources, have been extensively used to explain the expansion of social policy, predominantly in developed economies. We argue that they may not always be applicable in the Global South. Our article examines multiple factors at play in Indonesia’s healthcare policy expansion using qualitative content analysis of historical sources, literature, and nine interviews with key policy architects. Using the pull-and-push factor model, we examined the interactions between policy entrepreneurs and centre-right political parties in creating national healthcare policy architecture and expansion. Our findings confirm that the window of opportunity for expansion was augmented when the political party of the ruling government experienced a decline in public trust, while clientelistic motives among elites facilitated the reform process. Drawing the lesson from Indonesia, we contend push prevails over the pull factors (labour movement and cross-class alliances) in social policy development.

In East Asia, higher education support policies (HESPs), as the core of the social policies targeting young people, have undergone a significant transformation since the 2000s. The aim of this article is to articulate the reformation process of HESPs by focusing on the National Student Loan system and to investigate whether support for youth is still considered a family responsibility in the post-2000s environment. The findings offer a crucial clue in understanding the transformation of the familialistic East Asian welfare regime. The analysis reveals that Japan continues to respond to the expansion of youth support through family policy, but Korea is attempting to provide support for youth directly to individuals as an independent welfare target. This implies that HESPs are gradually losing their family-oriented characteristics, although these characteristics remain present in Japan, and that the familialistic East Asian welfare regime itself may transform in the future.

The digitalisation of public services brought challenges for their access and use. This article looks at the migrants as claimants of the public services to analyse the problems with the digital delivery of public services. The previous research recognised the various resources, such as digital skills and administrative literacy, needed for the successful use of digital services. However, the role of administrative literacy has not been studied in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts, such as migration. This article draws on the qualitative study of Russian-speaking migrants in Finland. By analysing the perspective of the service users, it describes in detail the requirements that people with migrant backgrounds try to meet to gain access to social protection. Findings demonstrate the multiple obstacles that burden or prevent access to entitlements.

This article explores the impacts of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown policies on young fathers and their families. We present analyses from a larger programme of qualitative longitudinal research examining young fatherhood in the UK and Sweden to develop a unique international comparative and empirical contribution. The views and experiences of young fathers are examined in the context of two ostensibly different policy approaches during the pandemic. Organised thematically to enable comparison, our findings demonstrate myriad impacts, illustrating heightened precarity in young fathers’ transitions into and through fatherhood linked to restrictions on their engagement and changes to their education and employment trajectories and relational contexts, especially in the UK. We observe how differences in policy approaches before and during the first wave of the pandemic shaped the experiences of young fathers in the respective countries.

COVID-19 triggers urgent questions about the social, political and ethical implications of care markets, practices and relations. This article presents analysis of the Houses of the Oireachtas Special Committee on Covid-19 Response exposing current discourses about care in Ireland. Utilising the Trace analysis method (Sevenhuijsen, 2004), grounded in feminist care ethics, reveals a state accountability exercise grappling with the failures of the care market and the inhumanity of congregated settings. Care discourses were constrained by a focus on the formal health system, normalisation of binary care giver and care receiver categorisations and a lack of recognition of gendered inequalities of care in homes and workplaces. Public discourse and feminist analysis revealed unreasonable labour conditions for women working in health and social care and a silencing of the voices of those with care needs. The article contributes to a reconceptualisation of care in post-pandemic futures and urges societal co-responsibility for ‘universal care’.

Coronaviruses have emerged as a potential disruptive force in policymaking. Using a comparative case study method, we examine two social policy responses in Jakarta, Indonesia: the Social Safety Nets (SSN) programme and the health policy. Such examples demonstrate an aggressive change in policy direction from means-tested systems and government-centred approaches to a total relaxation of conditions with the involvement of non-state actors in the provision of services. Our study analyses the ideational dimensions of the policy process that produces abrupt and radical change. From our analysis, the policy change may be explained by the emergence of a new policy paradigm created through the emulation-contextual process – an alternative model of policy learning. The theoretical implication of our research is that policy response in this study cannot be viewed in a completely path-dependent process. Instead, we propose a ‘path-creation accelerator,’ which represents an infrequent instance of policy change.

In Turkey, Early Childcare and Education (ECCE) policy has never been prioritised in the social policy agenda and was even further pushed back with the welfare state’s weakening role in the 2000s. The private sector, inaccessible for many, particularly low-income households, has tried to fill the significant gap in the supply side of these services. Municipalities and the Presidency of Religious Affairs (PoRA) have also recently become new actors in the provision of low-cost ‘care services’. This article compares the quality of these services by examining the number of students served, regulations, infrastructure, curricula, cost, and staff. Although neoliberalism has had an impact on welfare regimes in the European Union (EU) context, more established welfare and gender equality regimes have modified those impacts, resulting in a new institutionalisation, based on non-institutionalisation, of childcare services in Turkey’s national policy frame.

That domestic abuse is a human rights infringement has become recognised at policy, practice, and legislative level globally. Homelessness services are critical in averting and mitigating harm to those who have experienced domestic abuse. The British homelessness system achieves this, in part, through offering a legal right to housing in some circumstances. The Housing (Wales) Act 2014 integrates a human-rights based understanding of domestic abuse yet reduces legal rights to assistance. Based on analysis of interviews with fifty-two homelessness workers and twenty-four applicants I argue that moral commitments cannot compensate for legal rights; rather, they deresponsibilise homelessness services for addressing domestic abuse. I show (1) that workers saw cases where homelessness arose from domestic abuse as functionally beyond the remit of homelessness services (2) that empowered women were understood as undeserving by the system and (3) that workers saw domestic abuse cases as a broad and undefined threat to resources.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) reached political agendas as a proposal to radically reform welfare systems, followed by scholarly interest in its public legitimacy. While surveys find UBI support to be mostly redistribution-driven, the discussion in science and media suggests a more nuanced understanding. To comprehensively grasp the public response to UBI policy, this article explores the controversies surrounding UBI policy through a content analysis of Dutch tweets. In addition to identifying established controversies, our analysis points to two avenues for the study of UBI legitimacy. First, a multidimensional measure of UBI support should include redistributive, conditionality, and efficiency aspects. Second, dissatisfaction with targeted activation policy and ‘post-productivist’ attitudes should receive greater attention as drivers of UBI support. Overall, we find the pressure to reform welfare is more than the promise of a ‘free lunch’: it is anchored in fundamental critiques of economic and welfare institutions.

The following article is dedicated to the empirical case study from Ukraine and focuses on the work of Ukrainian courts resolving the cases of internally displaced persons in the realm of social policy. Based on interviews and secondary sources in terms of data, it explains the problem area of the legal regulations and administrative practices applicable to internally displaced Ukrainians in the sphere of social rights, and it analyses selected decisions of the courts in the cases brought by them, including the courts’ approaches, motivations and limitations, all while doing so from the combined perspective of security, law and internal migrants’ agency.

Workplace automation fueled by technological innovations has been generating social policy implications. Defying the prevalent argument that automation risk triggers employment insecurity and prompts individuals to favour redistribution, this study doesn’t find empirical evidence in the Chinese context. Analysing national survey data, this study reveals a very strong association between automation risk and popular preference for government responsibility in old-age support. Further analysis suggests that more generous local welfare systems generate a reinforcing effect between automation risk and individuals’ support for government involvement in old-age support. In a welfare system in which major redistributive policies are not employment-dependent, automation risk may not necessarily trigger stronger preferences for short-term immediate protection through redistributive programmes, but may stimulate individuals to project their need for social protection towards middle- or longer-term and employment-related policies. The generosity of subnational welfare systems moderates the formation of individuals’ social policy preferences through policy feedback.

In response to growing evidence that cultural values and behaviours are key drivers of men’s use of domestic violence against women, states across the globe are increasingly implementing prevention policies aimed at mobilising cultural change within the community. Through an examination of one Australian state’s recent and significant domestic violence policy reform, we demonstrate that, although state-led efforts to change community culture hold merit, they can also be undermined by exclusive constructions of the community. As a result, efforts to change community culture exclude the very group whose values and behaviours are most problematic: men who perpetrate domestic violence. We argue that broadening conceptualisations of community is of critical importance for policies seeking to change community culture. Such conceptualisations must necessarily include men who perpetrate domestic violence, as theirs are the values and behaviours that most urgently require change.

Labour market participation by refugees in their new host country is crucial both to the integration process and in terms of reducing public spending on income replacement benefits for refugees. In this article, we explore workplace factors associated with employment of refugees. For this purpose, we use a survey of Danish employers, in light of the fact that with some notable exceptions, the employer role has been somewhat neglected in existing research on labour market integration of refugees. We find that many different workplace factors are associated with employment of refugees. In addition to objective workplace characteristics, existing social responsibility practice, contacts by public employment services and the attitudes and preconceptions of employers towards refugees are of importance.