The 1998 Belfast Agreement seemed to promise women in Northern Ireland equality. This article examines the extent to which that promise has been met by exploring abortion rights in the region. It situates abortion within a citizens’ rights framework. The article explores the interconnectedness of civil, political and social rights and the implications of an inability to vindicate any aspect of those rights.

There has been exhaustive scrutiny of the policies of the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations Population Fund. UNICEF, despite a prominent role in agenda setting for children's welfare in developing countries, has not been subject to comparable scrutiny. This paper argues that the Country Programmes promulgated by UNICEF to improve children's welfare reflect ethnocentric conceptualisations of the family. As a case study, Ghana's Country Programme 2001–2005 is considered in detail. Anthropological studies are adduced to highlight underlying ethnocentric assumptions around social organisation. The ramifications of these assumptions are then considered.

This article examines the relationship in the UK between asylum-seeking and the labour market. Since 2002, asylum-seekers have not been allowed to work unless they have waited over twelve months for an initial decision on their asylum claim. This policy change occurred as employment was considered a ‘pull factor’ encouraging unfounded asylum claims. Despite not having the right to work, asylum-seekers – and especially those whose applications for refugee status have been refused by the UK government – interact with the labour market in manifold ways. Drawing on an ESRC-funded study in the UK's Yorkshire and Humber region and related studies, this article argues that both asylum-seekers and refused asylum-seekers form a hyper-exploitable pool of ‘illegalised’ and unprotected workers. As a vital part of their survival terrain, work is largely experienced as for-cash labouring in low-paid labour market sectors where the spectre of exploitation and even ‘modern slavery’ are perpetual threats. Recent policy shifts are deepening such threats through creating increasingly ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘hostile’ environments for certain categories of migrants.

In France, public policies in the field of disability was transformed by the law in 11 February 2005 on ‘Equal Rights and Opportunities, Participation, and Citizenship of People with Disabilities’. The law was framed as the introduction in France of the international ‘social model of disability’, in order to combat discrimination. Yet international references in parliamentary debates leading to the adoption of this law were all but absent. How do we explain this paradox? This article aims to answer this question by showing how the newly introduced measures reflected the needs of different stakeholders involved in this public policy to maintain their positions and reform their mutual agreements. This transfer was not characterised by a thorough rethinking of the public policy subsystem, but rather resulted in layering of new rights on top of old frameworks. How then did the organisations promoting these measures manage to implement public policies despite clear contradictions between old and new goals? This article suggests that the organisational regulation of political conflict (conflict avoidance and circumvention of obstacles) and the safeguarding of embedded interests (by limiting possibilities for compromise and administrative obstruction of legal disputes) played a decisive role in this process.

In his path-breaking account of ‘The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism’, Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990) aimed to provide a ‘re-specification of the welfare state’. This article examines the claim of Esping-Andersen that his account draws on the theoretical work of Polanyi, Marshall and Titmuss. It then explores the conceptual critique of Esping-Andersen which led to his 1999 revision, with its rather different theoretical underpinnings. It concludes that some of the theoretical underpinning of this work is unclear both in the work of Esping-Andersen and in subsequent accounts, resulting in a largely atheoretical debate. Concepts such as de-commodification do not appear to be clearly drawn from their stated ‘parent’ authors, and may not sum up the content or essence of welfare states. The ‘re-specification of the welfare state’ must be a larger part of the strategy of the welfare modelling business in the future.

Access to and engagement with information and communications technologies (ICTs) are increasingly important aspects of social inclusion. This paper draws upon analyses of UK survey data and a review of research on communications and social exclusion published in the UK between 2001 and 2006 to examine the social distribution of access to and uptake of ICTs and to explore key factors restricting the digital engagement of young people from lower income households and communities. It argues that effective strategies to bridge digital divisions in the UK must pay more attention to the social rather than technological barriers which inhibit communications inclusion.

The ageing of the population and increasing longevity result in predictions of sizeable increases in long-term care expenditures. Other analyses have shown significant decreases in disability prevalence among older people in the US. This study provides an empirical quantification of the net result of these two forces (increased expenditures due to ageing versus potential expenditure reductions due to reduced disability) using the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey. The analyses show that the implications of ageing and increasing longevity for long-term care expenditures are modest relative to the effects of future increases or decreases in functional abilities of older people.

The future of the welfare state in advanced liberal democracies is increasingly judged in economic terms. For, in an era of economic globalisation and heightened competition between economies, it is invariably suggested that the welfare state must prove its value in an exhaustive competitive audit if it is not to reveal itself an indulgent luxury and an unsustainable burden on competitiveness. Given the influence of such assumptions among policy-makers, it is unremarkable that social policy goals are increasingly subordinated to perceived economic imperatives. The critical dissection of the prevailing orthodox on the competitive-corrosive qualities of the welfare state in an era of (supposed) globalisation and welfare retrenchment is, then, a most urgent task for social policy analysts. In this paper I provide a review of the most recent comparative political economy of globalisation and regionalisation. This challenges, quite fundamentally, the view that globalisation is the proximate cause of welfare retrenchment in OECD countries and that high levels of welfare expenditure are incompatible with an open and competitive economy.

The link between inequality and negative social outcomes has been the subject of much debate recently, brought into focus by the publication of The Spirit Level. This article uses multilevel modelling to explore the relationship between inequality and five crime types at sub-national level across England. Controlling for other factors, inequality is positively associated with higher levels of all five crime types and findings are robust to alternative inequality specifications. Findings support the sociological – but not economic – theories and highlight the importance of policies to tackle broader social and economic inequalities.

This article provides a historical analysis of particular policy initiatives undertaken in the US and the UK in the 1960s and 1970s and asks to what extent the lessons from these policy initiatives can be transferred to current policy development in the UK today. The focus of the discussion is local community-based interventions, aimed at combating poverty and exclusion. These are now generally referred to in the UK as Area Based Initiatives (ABIs).

Conditional cash transfers have come to play a prominent role in the social policy landscape in Latin America and especially in Brazil in recent years. Evaluations of their impacts, however, have focused on limited short-term outcomes, particularly consumption and school enrolment and attendance rates. Long-term outcomes have received comparatively little attention. This article reviews the existing evidence on the long-term impacts of CCTs, focusing on the underlying assumptions in the CCT model for intergenerational poverty reduction. In doing so, it questions the notion that CCTs can indeed interrupt the intergenerational cycle of poverty through human capital investments that are thought to lead to expanded opportunities in the labour market. Moreover, it highlights the need for more research on the social processes that may influence young beneficiaries’ life trajectories and experiences in poverty.

In recent years neuroscience has increasingly been drawn on to focus attention on the significance of early childhood years for healthy brain development. However an examination of the literature suggests that brain science has little specific to offer parents. In spite of this, a belief that these first years are a critical period for child development has provided the impetus for the introduction of early intervention programmes targeting groups who are considered to be ‘at risk’. The literature indicates that the assumptions underpinning this notion are problematic and may have implications for the success of such interventions. The factors impacting on childhood outcomes are complex and cannot be reduced solely to biomedical explanations. A more effective way to tackle child health and welfare problems would involve a multidimensional approach and include the elimination of poverty and the scrutiny of all public policy.

A review of models and approaches to family-based policy and service provision for those at risk of social exclusion suggests three distinct categories. In the first category, approaches seek to strengthen the ability of family members to offer support to a primary service user within that family. In the second category, family members are recognised as having their own specific and independent needs arising out of their relationship with the primary service user. The third category includes ‘whole family approaches’ focused on shared needs and strengths that could not be dealt with through a focus on family members as individuals.

In many countries, people face cuts in jobs, wages and social security as economic austerity policies have been implemented to reduce public expenditure following the near collapse of the banking system in 2008. At the same time, rising food and fuel prices have combined to generate increasing and sometimes extreme hardship, not only in poorer countries of the global South where the impact has been severe, but also on economically vulnerable countries and populations in the global North. The re-emergence of ‘hunger’ as a widespread social reality and political concern in richer countries is a notable feature of the last few years, generating community responses and academic research even if, as yet, minimal policy response. For example, a recent special issue of the British Food Journal (Caraher and Cavicchi, 2014) on food banks included nine articles discussing the explosion in usage and acceptability of charitable food aid provision in rich countries. Riches and Silvasti's recent volume (2014), updating First World Hunger: Food Security and Welfare Politics (Riches, 1997) nearly two decades after its account of food and poverty in five rich economies, now provides evidence from twelve such countries, and there could have been more. What is perhaps even more remarkable is how slow public policy has been to react. Partly this is because the issues are cross-sectoral in the location of causal drivers and potential levers, and it is thus difficult to ascribe responsibility; partly it is because ‘hunger’ is not only difficult to define and document, it is also an intrinsically private issue: its experience and effects are personal, embodied and usually silent – except in extremes.

As from the beginning of the 1990s, almost all European countries have introduced wide-reaching social changes, among others in eligibility, entitlement, benefits structures and in the sources of financing. In this article, we propose that a consequence of those reforms may have been a repositioning of some countries in the welfare clusters. To test this hypothesis, we apply the two bi-dimensional classifications of Bonoli (1997) and Kautto (2002) to ten countries as representative of different welfare regimes. Our results reveal an interesting repositioning of some countries, especially Portugal, the UK and Sweden that represents evidence of welfare state reforms.

This paper considers activation policies in relation to older workers in a number of OECD countries. It explores four interpretations of ‘activation’ in respect of pension planning and retirement policies. However, activation policies need to be carefully evaluated. Labour market demands and a political language that stresses the ‘pension crisis’ and the ‘dependency ratio’ have to be considered in relation to established rights. Thus whilst governments may seek to promote a model of welfare based on the ‘consumer citizen’, in which retirement choices are made by reflexive individuals, the constraints on choice need to be highlighted. These constraints are likely to be unevenly distributed with some social groups experiencing longer working lives, less choice, with more compulsion and with conditions attached to any pension rights they may claim.

Central to the Blair government's economic and social policies has been the promotion of a more ‘knowledge-based economy’. However, some commentators have suggested that the knowledge economy stretches income distributions and polarises skilled and unskilled workers. Drawing on empirical data about the UK case to explore such claims, this paper concludes that there is a significant positive correlation between the extent to which a region's economy has become ‘knowledge based’ and its level of income inequality. It argues this finding has important policy relevant implications.

To date the main indicator used to compare the well-being of children in industrialised countries has been the proportion of children in income poverty. This article exploits data from recent work developing indices of child well-being in EU, OECD and CEE/CIS countries to explore whether child income poverty is a good representation of a wider understanding of child well-being. Using the poverty estimates in each index, as well as more recent estimates for the European Union, we find that for OECD countries income poverty still has some explanatory power but this is not the case for EU and CEE/CIS countries.

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programmes have spread across Latin America since the late 1990s. They constitute one of the major changes in social policy in Latin America in the last twenty years (Barrientos, 2009). This innovation has significantly influenced the welfare mix (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Those who examine the welfare mix from a feminist perspective (Orloff, 1996; Martínez, 2008) insist that it is necessary to take into account the gender consequences of changing this mix. Based on a qualitative analysis of CCT programmes in Peru and Bolivia, this article makes two arguments. First, CCT programmes demonstrate that instead of being purely liberal or even neoliberal, the actions of the state in the production of welfare are now grounded from the perspective of social investment. Second, in Peru and Bolivia, the gendered impacts of this new state orientation nonetheless reinforce maternalistic and coercive practices.

There are long-standing concerns of inequalities in the workplace among minority ethnic (ME) workers in the UK health and social care (H&SC) sectors. ME workers contribute significantly to H&SC delivery. However, there is considerable evidence of substantial negative experiences among this group across various workplace indicators and outcomes, including (mis)treatment. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these inequalities with higher infection rates and related deaths among ME health and care workers. A rapid review methodology was employed to examine the work experiences and outcomes of ME workers in H&SC in the UK, focusing on low paid workers. The review identified fifty-one relevant outputs, detailing the nature and extent of inequalities across recruitment, career progression and treatment at work, including bullying and harassment. The findings highlight the impact of the intersectionality of gender, race and migration status concerning the ways inequalities are manifested and operated through individual perceptions and institutional and structural racism.