We study the extent and nature of Christian engagement in morality policy implementation by means of a comparative case study in Germany. In particular, we observe that the nature of engagement varies between unconnected and corresponding types of activities, and we explain this variation with the policy-specific goal congruence between religious organizations (ROs) and the state. Goal congruence, in turn, can be linked to Catholic and Protestant moral doctrines that tell us about ROs' position on morality issues. The study contributes to the literature on faith-based welfare by highlighting the role of moral doctrines as drivers of ROs' social engagement.

Access to affordable housing is a rising concern, and social housing is one approach to support low-income, older renters. A scoping review was undertaken to understand the characteristics of older tenants and social housing services to identify strategies to promote aging in place. Seven peer review databases were searched to identify relevant articles. A total of 146 articles were included. Almost all examined socio-demographic and health characteristics of older tenants, while 72 per cent examined social housing services, including eligibility policies, staffing, and access to on-site services. This review points to a high vulnerability among older tenants and highlights the importance of co-locating services on-site with a tenant-facing support staff to identify vulnerable tenants and link them to services. More research on tenancy issues (e.g., unit condition, rental management) is needed to identify new opportunities for social housing landlords to help older tenants age in place.

Paperwork has always been a central part of bureaucratic work. Over the last few years, bureaucratic procedures have become increasingly standardised and digitalised. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork within welfare offices in Switzerland and Belgium, we reflect on the way evidence is constructed within social policy and cases built for or against noncitizen welfare recipients in order to show how paper truths are established and challenged. The focus on digital practices within public policy implementation highlights how it contributes to enhanced control mechanisms on the implementation level and how migration law continues to guide welfare governance for noncitizens. This allows targeting of the most marginalised groups, whose rights to access state support are institutionally impeded. Through database information flows, official forms, paper reports and face-to-face meetings, we further show how a hybrid form of bureaucratic work emerges, where direct contact with the client is still key, yet highly influenced by standardisation processes.

The design and evaluation of social policies requires information systems that enable social intervention with the people targeted by the programmes and services and that also offer indicators for the follow-up and monitoring of the policies adopted. The article presents the process of validation of a tool for diagnosing situations of social difficulty arising from social exclusion. The scale has been implemented in one of Spain’s seventeen Autonomous Communities and has been selected on the basis of Good Practice under the European Social Fund. Expert judges were consulted for content validity; the metric properties of the scores obtained by the scale were examined and an exploratory factorial analysis (EFA) was performed to study the internal structure. The results show that the scale has adequate levels of content validity, construct validity and internal consistency. The SiSo Scale supplies a synthetic index of Social Position, providing professionals with the technical tools needed to carry out social diagnoses and simultaneously giving valid and reliable information on the social condition of people in a situation of social exclusion, which can guide social policy decision-making.

Contracting of social services has been adopted in China as an innovation in welfare provision. This article reviews the emerging literature on contracting of services to social organisations in China in order to identify lines of further enquiry. It reviews research published in the English and Chinese languages up to 2018. We identify three distinct narratives: public sector reform, improvement of welfare service quality and capacity, and transformation of state-society relations. We contrast the identified narratives with the empirical evidence produced for the Chinese case. We demonstrate that, despite contradictory empirical evidence, the premise that contracting improves public sector efficiency and quality of services predominates. The narrative that contracting transforms state-society relations is contested. This article contributes to the understanding of how contracting of services is justified in theory and practice, and proposes an agenda for future social policy research on contracting of services to social organisations in China.

The concept of autonomy is essential in the practice and study of gerontology and in long-term care policies. For older adults with expanding care needs, scores from tightly specified assessment instruments, which aim to measure the autonomy of service users, usually determine access to social services. These instruments emphasise functional independence in the performance of activities of daily living. In an effort to broaden the understanding of autonomy into needs assessment practice, the province of Québec (Canada) added social and relational elements into the assessment tool. In the wake of these changes, this article studies the interaction between the use of assessment instruments and the extent to which they alter how older adults define their autonomy as service users. This matters since the conceptualisation of autonomy shapes the formulation of long-term care policy problems, influencing both the demand and supply of services and the types of services that ought to be prioritised by governments. Relying on focus groups, this study shows that the functional autonomy frame dominates problem definitions, while social/relational framings are marginal. This reflects the more authoritative weight of functional autonomy within the assessment tool and contributes to the biomedicalisation of aging.

There are multiple structural and practical barriers to Aboriginal young people with cognitive disability in remote areas receiving the support and services they need. Multidisciplinary mixed-methods research over the past decade has provided evidence of the ways that many such young people end up with complex support needs and being ‘managed’ by police and justice agencies in the absence of appropriate early intervention, transition support and community-based options. This article presents and synthesises knowledge generated by this body of work and contextualises it within the experiences and trajectory of a young Aboriginal woman with cognitive disability and complex support needs from a remote town. This case study is drawn from a New South Wales linked administrative dataset containing data from health, housing, disability, human services, police, legal, court and justice agencies on a cohort of people who have been incarcerated. The article draws out key principles and strategies to suggest what a community-led, holistic service response could have looked like for Casey.

There has been a general increase in poverty over the last decade in Italy, which has mainly affected the younger generations, with children and youth experiencing the worst economic conditions. This is primarily not due to a lack of available economic resources but to the way in which these resources are allocated: mainly in the form of cash transfers rather than services. The provision of adequate services based on professional work needs to be implemented by overcoming two main obstacles which are highlighted by the results of two studies presented here. The first study concerns the quality of professional care and the systematic use of outcome evaluation, the second concerns the vision of professionals and their ability to integrate the provision of services with economic support aimed at improving children’s growth and parenting skills. The two studies were carried out as part of an international debate on how to effectively fight poverty and social exclusion of children which was promoted by the International Association for Outcome-based Evaluation and Research on Family and Children’s Services (iaOBERfcs).

Older women living alone are at risk of being socially and financially disadvantaged, which impacts their wellbeing. Currently there is a significant gap in knowledge relating to older women living alone. This study aimed to identify the barriers and enablers to service access in this group. We undertook a qualitative study comprising semi-structured interviews in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. Thematic analysis was conducted to elucidate key themes. Thirty-seven women were interviewed between May and August 2017. Six key themes were identified: financial; mental and emotional health; mobility and ability; transport; social connections; and knowledge. Access issues for older women living alone are multifaceted and interconnected. Barriers and enablers to service access, as well as their intersections with gender and living situation, should be considered in service design and re-design.

Older adults are more susceptible to adverse health outcomes during and after a disaster compared with their younger counterparts. Ageing-in-place organisations such as senior centres and Villages provide social services and programming for older adults and may support older adults’ resilience to disasters. This study examines the role of ageing-in-place organisations in building disaster resilience for older adults. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 14 ageing-in-place organisation leaders in King County, Washington in the United States of America. The sample included representatives of five government-run senior centres, seven non-profit senior centres and two Villages. Interviews were audio-recorded and professionally transcribed. We used a combined inductive and deductive approach to code and thematically analyse the data. Ageing-in-place organisation leadership recognise disasters as a threat to older adults’ health and safety, and they see opportunities to provide disaster-related support for older adults, though the type and extent of participation in resilience-building activities reflected each organisation's unique local context. Organisations participate in a variety of disaster-related activities, though respondents emphasised the importance of collaborative and communication-focused efforts. Findings suggest that ageing-in-place organisations may be best equipped to support older adults’ disaster resilience by serving as a trusted source of disaster-related information and providing input on the appropriateness of disaster plans and messages for the unique needs of older adults ageing-in-place.

Increasingly, decentralization is being adopted by countries in which assumptions made by formal models of decentralization, such as electoral accountability and population mobility, fail to hold. How does decentralization affect public service delivery in such contexts? The authors exploit the partial rollout of decentralization in the autocratic context of Ethiopia and use a spatial regression discontinuity design to identify its effects. Decentralization improves delivery of productive services, specifically, agricultural services, but has no effect on social services, specifically, drinking water services. This finding is consistent with a model in which local leaders have superior information about the public investments that will deliver the greatest returns and they are incentivized by decentralization to maximize citizens’ production—on which rents depend—rather than citizens’ utility. These findings shed light on nonelectoral mechanisms through which decentralization affects public goods provision and help to explain decentralization’s mixed effects in many nondemocratic settings.

In Costa Rica, there is a widespread belief among the public and policymakers that the country's ‘exceptional’ universal healthcare system represents a magnet for Nicaraguan immigrants. However, examining immigrants’ actual access to social policy demonstrates the importance of legal and extra-legal mechanisms of exclusion that go hand in hand with official recognition of human rights. This paper critically assesses the relationship between migrants and the state, and public social policy in particular, in both sending and receiving country. We analyse the extent to which Nicaraguan migrant families on both sides of the Costa Rica–Nicaragua migration system incorporate public social protection in their welfare strategies. Drawing on two sets of qualitative data, we find that, on both sides of the border, migrants and their families display very similar commodified practices of welfare strategies, side-stepping the state and purchasing services in the private sector.

Western societies are ageing rapidly. Today people do not only live longer, they also have fewer children. These developments exert considerable pressure on welfare states. Children have usually been the mainstay of old age support, especially when there is no partner. We thus face new challenges: On which support networks can a growing number of childless older people rely? (How) can the lack of children be compensated in the informal social network? What role does the state play and how is informal and formal support linked? Our comparative analyses of the support networks of childless elders are based on the first two waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, including 14,394 people with (instrumental) activities of daily living limitations aged 50 and over from 12 European countries. On average, 10 per cent of older Europeans today have no children. Sporadic informal support for these elders is often taken over by the extended family, friends and neighbours, and thus the lack of children is compensated within the social network. Intense care tasks, however, are more likely provided by professional providers, especially in the case of childless older people. In countries with low social service provision, childless elders are therefore likely to experience a lack of (formal) support, especially when depending on vital care.

National surveys show that people from minority ethnic groups tend to be less satisfied with social care services compared with the white population, but do not show why. Research indicates that barriers to accessing services include lack of information, perceptions of cultural inappropriateness and normative expectations of care. Less research has examined the experience of minority ethnic service users after they access services. This study conducted in-depth interviews with 82 South Asian and White British service users and family carers, the majority of whom were older people. Thematic analysis was used. The key theme was understanding the social care system. Participants with a good understanding of the system were more able to adapt and achieve control over their care. Participants with a poor understanding were uncertain about how to access further care, or why a service had been refused. More White British than South Asian participants had a good understanding of the system. There was more in common between the South Asian and White British participants' experiences than might have been expected. Language was an important facilitator of care for South Asian participants, but ethnic matching with staff was less important. Recommendations include better communication throughout the care process to ensure service users and carers have a clear understanding of social care services and hence a better experience.

Active inclusion aims at the reduction of poverty by strengthening the agency of excluded persons by the provision of a minimum income, activation and social services. The contribution to poverty alleviation is determined by expenditure levels and the organisation of these three policy fields. This can be shown by three examples: The comprehensive Swedish regime is characterised by high expenditures; the redistributive German regime is characterised by lower service levels and in Italy, all three dimensions are least developed. In addition, the organisation of services differs: Decentralised and discretionary system for the provision of services in Sweden, “creaming and parking” effects in Germany and fragmented providers in Italy. As a result of different expenditure levels and organisational patterns, the selectivity of active inclusion strategies is low in Sweden, medium in Germany and high in Italy. Both the financial and organisational dimensions of active inclusion therefore are decisive for poverty alleviation.