Northern Ireland has witnessed significant political progress with devolution and a power sharing Executive in place since May 2007. These political achievements, however, conceal a highly polarised society characterised by sectarianism and community divisions, the legacy of a protracted conflict. This paper is located in the theoretical discourse between consociationalists who argue that antithetical identities cannot be integrated and advocates of social transformation who support greater cross-community peace-building initiatives through the involvement of civil society. This theoretical debate is taking place in a policy vacuum. The Northern Ireland Executive has abandoned its commitment to the previous (direct rule) administration's A Shared Future policy and is now considering alternatives broadly described as community cohesion, sharing and integration. Using a case study of a Protestant/Catholic interface community, this paper offers empirical evidence of the effectiveness of one social transformation initiative involving community groups in a highly segregated area of West Belfast.

Drawing on data collected as part of a qualitative study on parent abuse, this article explores how child to parent violence is constructed by professionals working within the three related domains of youth justice, domestic violence and child protection. The article, a discussion piece, charts the continuities and contradictions contained within practitioners’ understandings of this form of family violence, focusing on how the problem emerges, the causal explanations employed and their impact on practice responses.

This paper explores the role of conditionality in policies targeting the poor. By requiring beneficiaries to send their children to school and to undertake regular health visits, proponents argue, conditionalities improve human capital outcomes, promoting resilience. This widespread perception has led to the adoption of conditional cash transfers in many countries. Yet policy debate on conditionality does not always reflect a full appreciation of how behavioural, administrative and political economy variables influence outcomes. This paper identifies the multiple channels through which conditionality determines human capital outcomes and reviews the evidence on linkages between conditionality and processes of resilience.

Debates about the ban on smoking in public places have centred on the right to self-determination and privacy versus the right to health. This paper addresses the issue of smoking in relation to mental health and focuses on the right to dignity and respect. The public health agenda on smoking has involved the mobilisation of stigma to persuade people to give up. The paper argues that this strategy risks adding to the stigma and process of ‘othering’ that many mental health service users already experience and is also likely to be ineffective in reducing smoking rates, particularly among heavy smokers.

Finland is widely considered a frontrunner in the European basic income debate, primarily because of the decision by Juha Sipilä’s centre-right coalition government to design and conduct the first national basic income experiment (2017–2018). The Finnish basic income experiment builds on several decades of public and policy debate around the merits and problems of basic income, with the framing of basic income over time changing to fit the shift of the Nordic welfare state to embrace the activation paradigm. Underlying this discursive layer, however, we find several discrete, relatively small and unintended institutional developments that have arguably aligned the design of Finnish unemployment security closer to a partial basic income scheme. While the latter may suggest Finland has important stepping stones in place, important stumbling blocks remain and the jury is very much out on whether Finland would be the first European country to fully institute a basic income.

Since 2000, the New South Wales (NSW) Government in Australia has pursued major child welfare reforms. Responding to the ‘crisis in child protection’ and informed by a public health approach, key aims were to prevent child maltreatment and promote child welfare by ‘expanding and enhancing early intervention and family services’. This article critically reviews the aims, approach and main developments in NSW. The article argues that in several respects the reforms extended and enhanced early intervention and family services in cost-effective ways but suffered from implementation problems, limitations in service developments and major reform challenges which inhibited their scope and impacts. These limitations raise critical issues about the reform framework, resource constraints and ideological influences.

J. Le Grand (2003), Motivation, Agency, and Public Policy: Of Knights and Knaves, Pawns and Queens, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

R. Lister (2004), Poverty, Polity Books, Cambridge.

L. Mead (2004), Government Matters: Welfare Reform in Wisconsin, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford.

Based on qualitative research completed in the United States on pathways into and out of commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC), this article focuses on themes of harm, resilience and survival-focused coping by prostituted teens and makes recommendations for policy and practice. The research on which it is based takes a life-course perspective on pathways into and out of CSEC. Analyses of the narratives of homeless, runaway and sexually victimised (prostituted and trafficked) teens suggest the need for a more nuanced understanding of both harm and survival that has important implications for practice and policy communities responding to human trafficking within and across borders.

In this article, qualitative longitudinal (QL) research is presented as a powerful form of fluid enquiry. The combination of its real-world and real-time features enables this methodology to ‘follow reality in all its windings’, and, thereby, to produce useful knowledge for policy and professional practice. The main focus is on the power of QL methodology to illuminate complex causal processes by teasing out their multiple, fluid and relational elements. The article goes on to consider new ways to broker the interface between research endeavours and policy processes, based on collaborative modes of knowledge co-production that unfold in real-time. QL enquiry emerges here as more than an added option, a ‘niche’ approach. It has potential as a valuable ‘impact’ tool for discerning causality in new ways and reformulating insights into ‘what works?’, with scope to play a pivotal role in shaping and facilitating change in policy and practice settings.

‘Parent abuse’ is the most under-researched form of family abuse and the research that exists is characterised by diverse and discrete methodological approaches which have produced somewhat inconsistent findings. This critical review examines these different research approaches and discusses the methodological challenges which they present. The review concludes by suggesting how research might develop to produce a more coherent and contextual methodology which does justice to the complexities of the topic.

Britain has entered a new era of super-diversity and many regions of the UK are experiencing the arrival of new communities. Refugee Community Organisations (RCOs) have developed following the arrival of new asylum seeking and refugee communities, and have been charged with the role of supporting the integration of these newcomers. However, there is much evidence to suggest that they are functioning only with individuals rather than working with institutions to transform systems and ensure welfare provision is adapted to account for diverse needs. This paper looks at the role of RCOs in attempting transformation and, using data collected through survey, interviews, and participatory action research, examines the extent to which RCOs are able to engage with the public and wider voluntary sector, to ensure that refugees' welfare needs can be met. It finds that in addition to the much-researched functional barriers to transformation, there are major institutional barriers to engagement. Institutions have failed to adapt their systems to enable representation of new communities instead expecting RCOs to build their own capacity to communicate. The paper ends by offering some ideas around resourcing RCOs to be represented and developing the capacity of institutions to adapt to new diversity.

There has been considerable attention on Brazil’s experience in applying the right to the city, influencing the urban reform movement and subsequent legislation including the 1988 Constitution and the 2001 Statute of the City. While much is known about Brazil’s urban transformations, this article views this trajectory within debates on social citizenship, expanding the focus to show that property is integral to this debate. Through the lens of social citizenship, property rights and insurgency, this article traces Brazil’s right to the city debate through a focus on three issues: (1) the rights dimension of such debates; (2) the role of the social function of property in urban legislation; and (3) the role of insurgent planning evident in urban social movements. While property rights and land rights are often distanced from debates on social citizenship, the Brazil case provides evidence in which the two are clearly intertwined.

This article discusses some of the problems involved in trying to develop gender-sensitive ways of measuring poverty. It argues that what is needed is a way of placing individuals within households and measuring both their contribution to the resources of that household and the extent of their dependence on the resources of others within the household. It is argued that this should involve examining sources as well as levels of income, and by adopting an approach that is dynamic, rather than static. The concept of social exclusion – multi-dimensional, dynamic, local and relational – could provide a way to explore these issues of autonomy and dependency, and their gender dimensions.

Recent texts on globalisation and education policy refer to the rapid flow of education policy texts producing or responding to common trends across nation states with the emergence of new knowledge economies. These educational policies are shaping what counts as research and the dynamics between research, policy, and practice in schools, creating new types of relationships between universities, the public, the professions, government, and industry. The trend to evidence-based policy and practice in Australian schools is used to identify key issues within wider debates about the ‘usefulness’ of educational research and the role of universities and university-based research in education in new knowledge economies.

The 2008 welfare reform introduced by the previous Labour government requires (most) lone parents with older children to be available for work. This article examines the potential effect of this reform on the employment rate of lone parents and whether the age of the youngest child is a good indicator of ‘ability to work’. It suggests that reform will not lead to the desired increase as the target group is too small and the levels of multiple disadvantages within the group too high. ‘Ability to work’ needs to be conceptualised more broadly if it is to mean ‘ability to get a job’.

This paper addresses the question of how families are changing in the context of transformed policies on divorce in England and Wales. However, rather than painting a picture of change through the use of statistical data, the argument will be based on qualitative data which focuses on the interiority of family and kin relationships and on the principles and reasonings that individuals give for their actions. This provides more of a ground-up perspective on social change, and prioritises the actions of parents, grandparents and children rather than focusing on the consequences of policies. It is argued that we need to recognise that the changing nature of family life pushes people to negotiate new moral codes or principles, and that this in turn is generating new ways of ‘doing’ post-divorce family life.

Since the global financial crisis in 2008, an ‘austerity consensus’ has emerged across many advanced capitalist economies (Farnsworth and Irving, 2012). Despite differing institutional settings, there has been a notable degree of convergence on fiscal consolidation (Farnsworth and Irving, 2012; Taylor-Gooby, 2012). Alongside this, political administrations have repeatedly claimed that welfare profligacy and dependency are key causes of public sector debt and economic stagnation. On this basis, political leaders have cultivated a policy mandate to re-configure working-age welfare and constrain public social expenditure in this domain. Taken together, these reforms represent a ‘new, more constrained and qualitatively different deal for citizens’ (Dwyer and Wright, 2014: 33). The central objective of this themed section is to explore the impact of these developments and their significance for the shifting character and operation of social citizenship in countries pursuing a similar strategy of ‘welfare austerity’ (MacLeavy, 2011: 360).

Welfare state retrenchment and its corollary, the encouragement of ‘active citizenship’, are widespread phenomena in Western countries today. While public and academic debates have focused on the practical consequences of changing rules and shrinking entitlements, there has been much less attention on how citizens experience these reforms and their accompanying rhetoric. We know even less about how welfare reform impacts upon people's emotions. Such a focus, however, is important because the reform of the welfare state is about more than changing rights and duties. Reforms tell citizens what they are worth, how they are valued and judged, and how they are supposed to feel about the new arrangements.

In response to the ageing and shrinking of the working-age population, the European Union has agreed ambitious goals for raising the employment rate and the exit age of older workers. This article traces the development of EU policy approaches and presents EU-15 figures on the state of affairs. Progress so far has been modest, but EU policies are expected to facilitate the emergence of better regimes of age management within Member States. In turn, this will help Europe move towards its employment targets for the working population aged 55 to 64 years.

Genetic developments are viewed with distrust by the disability rights community. But the argument that genetic screening promotes social injustice is not straightforward. Disabled people are affected by both the problems of impairment and the problems of disability. Preventing impairment should be a priority as well as preventing disability. Questions of social justice arise if biomedical approaches are prioritized at the cost of structural changes in society. They also arise when disabled people do not have access to genetic medicine. On a global scale, the priorities for impairment prevention are basic healthcare, not high technology medicine.