Since the 2008 crisis, there has been a sharp rise in demand for food aid across high-income countries, spurring increased academic interest in the issue of food insecurity. Despite this heightened interest, there remains a paucity of quantitative evidence on trends in the prevalence of food insecurity in rich countries. In this context, the following article presents ‘direct’ evidence on recent patterns of food insecurity across countries and welfare regimes using secondary analysis of the European Quality of Life Survey. It uses an item which has been a longstanding component of deprivation scales, ‘could your household afford a meal with meat, chicken or fish every second day if you wanted it?’, to investigate two hypotheses. First, we explore whether food insecurity has risen since the 2008 crisis as the rise in food aid suggests. Second, we examine if this rise has varied across welfare regimes, if it has occurred at all. The article finds evidence to support both contentions: food insecurity has risen across many European countries and has varied by welfare regime. It also finds that contrary to expectations, the sharpest rise was in the Anglo-Saxon countries of Ireland and the UK, rather than Southern or Eastern European countries.

Gender inequalities are a key issue for most pension systems in Latin America. Contributory pension schemes that link benefit entitlements to work and earnings tend to reflect in the benefits they offer the gender gaps that prevail in the labour market. This deepened with the implementation of individual private accounts as part of structural pension reforms in a number of countries. This article evaluates how recent pension policies, including measures geared to coverage expansion and so-called pension ‘re-reforms’, have addressed gender gaps in pensions in four Latin American countries. It shows that the expansion of non-contributory pensions and a greater emphasis on redistribution are important for the protection of older women in a context of gendered labour markets and the unequal distribution of paid and unpaid work between women and men. Looking at the cases of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Chile, the article identifies progress but also the persistence of gender gaps in pensions and emphasises the need for further measures to promote adequate social protection for older women.

Relative poverty, a concept developed by left-wing social scientists, categorises as ‘poor’ those who fall seriously behind normal nationwide material standards. This article argues that the widespread view that the word ‘poverty’ means ‘relative poverty’, which in left-dominated social policy academia often extends to implying that those who do not define poverty this way are necessarily misguided, has led to an incomplete portrayal of poorer British people's lived experience. The article examines published empirical work, before presenting findings from British Social Attitudes surveys and interviews with forty unemployed Jobseeker's Allowance claimants and thirty employed people. Both the existing and new findings exposed aspects of public attitudes and experience which resonate with unanswered academic criticisms of defining poverty as relative poverty. These public contributions have tended to be glossed over or treated dismissively by social policy authors, despite them attaching importance to Left-friendly aspects of poorer people's experience and attitudes.

The youth foyer model was designed to provide a package of support, including accommodation to homeless or at-risk young people, based on participation in education, training and/or employment as a supported transition to independent living and a sustainable livelihood. Commencing in the early 1990s, the UK has developed a large number of foyers while Australia is a relative newcomer to this kind of supportive youth housing. Unlike in the UK, existing and proposed Australian foyer income generated from current benefits and subsidies is not sufficient to cover the cost of support. We highlight the need for an extensible source of funding specifically for supportive housing for homeless and at-risk youth in order to ensure the financial sustainability and therefore replicability of the foyer model in Australia. We also discuss some issues relating to the translation of the model from one national context to another.

Celebrating the 25th birthday of Gøsta Esping-Andersen's seminal book The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990), this article looks back at the old ‘liberal world’ and examines the new. In so doing, it contributes to debates and the literature on liberal welfare state development in three main ways. First, it considers the concept of ‘liberalism’ and liberal ideas about welfare provision contained within Three Worlds. Here we are also interested in how liberal thought has conceptualised the (welfare) state, and the class-mobilisation theory of welfare-state development. Second, the article elaborates on ‘neo-’liberal social reforms and current welfare arrangements in the English-speaking democracies and their welfare states. Finally, it considers the extent to which the English-speaking world of welfare capitalism is still meaningfully ‘liberal’ and coherent today.

At the same time as failures to adequately protect ‘the most vulnerable’ seem to have become a pervasive feature of the political landscape, policies which seek to address vulnerability have proliferated. Government actors, public officers, researchers, media commentators, charities and members of the public alike use vulnerability to articulate an array of personal and political troubles, yet alongside this seemingly shared narrative a multitude of ideologically inclined assumptions and agendas operate by stealth. How vulnerability is drawn upon to frame social issues reworks and reconfigures long-running contestations related to moral dimensions of the welfare subject, understandings of the ‘self’ and wider beliefs about human behaviour. At a time when the pressures of contemporary life increasingly find release through aggression against the socially marginalised (see Wacquant, 2009; Harrison and Sanders, 2014; Atkinson, 2015), vulnerability has become a key concept for social policy research. As I have argued elsewhere, the concept of vulnerability appears to be something of a zeitgeist or ‘spirit of the time’ (Brown, 2014a, 2014b,2015), extending into and shaping responses to a vast array of policy matters.

Whilst it remains a criminal activity to solicit sex publicly in the UK, it has become increasingly popular to configure sex workers as ‘vulnerable’, often as a means of foregrounding the significant levels of violence faced by female street sex workers. Sex work scholars have highlighted that this discourse can play an enabling role in a moralistic national policy agenda which criminalises and marginalises those who sell sex. Yet multiple and overlapping narratives of vulnerability circulate in this policy arena, raising questions about how these might operate at ground level. Drawing on empirical data gathered in the development of an innovative local street sex work multi-agency partnership in Leeds, this article explores debates, discourses and realities of sex worker vulnerability. Setting applied insights within more theoretically inclined analysis, we suggest how vulnerability might usefully be understood in relation to sex work, but also highlight how social justice for sex workers requires more than progressive discourses and local initiatives. Empirical findings highlight that whilst addressing vulnerability through a local street sex work multi-agency partnership initiative, a valuable platform for shared action on violence in particular can be created. However, an increase in fundamental legal and social reform is required in order to address the differentiated and diverse lived experiences of sex worker vulnerability.

Vulnerability has become a ubiquitous description in policy and everyday educational settings as well as a foundation for a progressive politics, inside and outside education. Increasingly embedded in apocalyptic discourses about mental health, a psycho-emotional interpretation of vulnerability has elevated its status as a powerful and highly normative cultural metaphor. The article uses a critical realist approach to explore wider developments in ‘therapeutic culture’ that frame the rise of what I call ‘vulnerability creep’ in the education system. Drawing together examples of vulnerability creep in English universities, I argue that the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy is a stark illumination of dangers that arise when educational goals and practices are rooted in images of psycho-emotionally vulnerable human subjects. The phenomena explored in the article raise important social science questions that require further empirical and theoretical study.

The term vulnerability has little theoretical purchase in social policy. It is used widely as a short-hand phrase to describe deficit. As such, it provides only limited value and has little regard for the wider structures of society that might ameliorate, sustain or exacerbate vulnerability. There is, however, a critical literature that seeks to understand the social, economic and political relationships that produce vulnerability and its potential opposite, flourishing. This article draws on this theoretical literature, focusing particularly on relational accounts of autonomy, capabilities and functioning, and the role of societal institutions. Using cases drawn from empirical research investigating how grandparents care for their grandchildren in relationships characterised by rescue and repair, this article refines a relational model of the longitudinal space of vulnerability. It extends explanation of three dimensions of the model: basic needs, the capacity to be and access to service providers, and elaborates on how these dimensions inter-relate through an investigation of empowerment.

This article engages with emerging debates in law and feminist philosophy around the concept of vulnerability. Central to this is the call to re-imagine and re-frame vulnerability as universal – as something which is experienced by all individuals, by virtue of their humanity and context as social beings. The implications of this for laws and policies predicated on groups or categories as ‘being vulnerable’ will be explored in this article, using the concept of mental capacity as an example of how the boundary between capacity and incapacity can be contested through this lens. The article will critically consider the Mental Capacity Act 2005 and associated literature, such as Court of Protection cases, the House of Lords Select Committee's post-legislative scrutiny and Serious Case Reviews, which demonstrate the growing concern about the inadequacy of the binary between capacity and incapacity. This in turn provokes a challenge to accepted wisdom in the context of disability more broadly, inviting us to think in particular about the responses to perceived vulnerability that are currently deemed appropriate. Insights from the legal literature invite further exchanges with social policy theorists as to the concept of vulnerability and its challenges and implications for law and policy.

Precarious forms of employment and increased subjectivation have profoundly altered the way in which wage-labour acts as an integrative force in society. At the same time and contributing to these changes, the focus of social policies has undergone a significant transformation, leading to an increased emphasis on individualised activation. Using the concept of vulnerability, the article has three objectives: First, to argue for an understanding of vulnerability that is sensitive to the importance of wage-labour; secondly, to outline how changes in labour markets due to the ongoing crisis of contemporary capitalism create vulnerability and to assess how social policies contribute as well as attempt to respond to these vulnerabilities with ambivalent outcomes; and finally to introduce an analytical approach to explore the interplay between social policy and socio-economic structures in determining the extent and nature of labour-market related vulnerability using the case of self-employment.

Social injustices, structural and personal crises as well as intensifying stress on some citizens seem increasing preoccupations in contemporary society and social policy. In this context, the concept of vulnerability has come to play a prominent role in academic, governmental and everyday accounts of the human condition. Policy makers and practitioners are now concerned with addressing vulnerability through an expansive range of interventions. As this special issue draws attention to, a vulnerability zeitgeist or ‘spirit of the time’ has been traced in contemporary welfare and disciplinary arrangements (Brown, 2014, 2015), which now informs a range of interventions and approaches to social problems, both in the UK and internationally. As prominent examples, ‘vulnerable’ people are legally entitled to ‘priority need’ in English social housing allocations (Carr and Hunter, 2008), vulnerable victims of crime are seen as requiring special responses in the UK criminal justice system (see Roulstone et al., 2011; Walkgate, 2011), ‘vulnerable adults’ have designated ‘protections’ under British law (Dunn et al., 2008; Clough, 2014) and vulnerable migrants and refugees are increasingly prioritised within international immigration processes (Peroni and Timmer, 2013). There is a long tradition in the field of social policy of critiquing the implications of particular concepts as mechanisms of governance, from poverty (Townsend, 1979; Lister, 2004) and social exclusion (Levitas, 1998; Young 1999) to risk (Beck, 1992; Kemshall, 2002) and resilience (Ecclestone and Lewis, 2014; Wright, 2016). Yet while vulnerability seems to be one of the latest buzzwords gathering political and cultural momentum, critiques and empirical studies of how it is operationalised in different policy and practice contexts are less well elaborated.