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Welfare states face profound challenges. Widening economic and social inequalities and insecurities have been intensified by the post-financial crisis austerity politics, sharpened by the rise in ethno-nationalism, and cruelly exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, recent decades have seen a resurgence of social justice activism at the local and transnational levels. Major global movements such as Occupy, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and Global Women’s Strike have been as compelling in their necessity as in their massive mobilizations. Yet the transformative power of feminist, anti-racist and post-/decolonial, and ecological thinking is still relatively marginal to core social policy theory, while other critical approaches – around disability, sexuality, migration, childhood and old age – have found recognition only selectively.

This book offers an analysis that attempts to bring many of these issues together. Combining critical and intersectional approaches with ideas to have emerged out of contemporary struggles for social justice, it examines key issues and themes in social policy today. These range from questions of agency; the constitution of welfare subjects through austerity; the social, ethical and contested relations of welfare; global crises; and the transnational social and political economy of care. The approach informs and connects critical and intersectional analyses of multiple social inequalities and social justice with questions of political practice: not only how to ‘do’ social politics but also how our lives together might be better lived.

The analysis has three integral elements. First, I argue that we need to contextualize the development of neoliberal and austerity welfare not only in terms of the crisis of financialized capitalism but also in terms of the interconnected global crises of care and social reproduction, the environment and climate change, and the external and internal racializing of national borders. Together these threaten human and planetary sustainability while also generating multiple and intersecting inequalities. The second element translates this global context into national social policy through an analysis of the dynamics of intersecting social relations of power; these are articulated through the meanings, materialities and policies attached to family, nation, work and nature. Third, I explore how the contestations for social justice that these crises provoke provide new political ethics and prefigurative politics, especially in the understanding of new formations of interdependence, relationality and democracy, solidarity, and humanity. These provide a guide to consider the transformative possibilities for a future eco-welfare commons.

There is for me a sense of déjà vu about the marginality of radical and transformative thinking in mainstream social policy. In 1987 I published an article entitled ‘Racism and the discipline of social policy: a critique of welfare theory’ (Williams 1987). This outlined a new analysis of how imperialism, colonialism and nationhood had framed early social policy and the post-war welfare state; how this analysis should be informed by the struggles of racialized groups; and how these were intersected by class and gender relations. Social Policy: A Critical Introduction: Issues of ‘Race’, Gender and Class, followed, in which I argued that these three social relations needed to be interconnected and central to an analysis of social policy. I offered an analytical framework of family, nation and work through which these social relations were articulated (Williams 1989). I was one of many scholars in the UK at the time pursuing such analyses shaped, as we were, by the strength and limitations of Marxism reflected in the new social movements of the time, especially around feminism, black feminism, anti-racism, and gay and lesbian liberation (Weeks 1977; Wilson 1977; Hall et al. 1978; Lewis and Parmar 1983; Amos et al. 1984; Bhavnani and Coulson 1986; Phoenix 1987; Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; Brah 1996).

Fast forward thirty years. In July 2019 the UK’s Social Policy Association published a commissioned report: The Missing Dimension: Where Is ‘Race’ in Social Policy Teaching and Learning? (Craig et al. 2019; see also Cole et al. 2020). The report examined curricula of social policy courses, journal and conference content over the previous five years, and BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) representation among students and staff. In terms of the curriculum and literature, the report found the lack of focus on race and racism to be ‘dismal’. In terms of staff and student representation, this was overwhelmingly white. BAME students did not find the curriculum relevant to their concerns. This repeated the point made earlier by Craig: ‘It is still not uncommon for mainstream social policy texts to treat debates on “race” and racism as marginal’ (Craig 2007: 610). This is in spite of the fact that, as I argue in this book, since that time policies around the racialization of national borders, bordering practices within the UK, and a ‘hostile environment’ have all had detrimental outcomes on the citizenship rights and social and economic inequalities of minority ethnic and migrant groups. These have had specific gendered effects but have also provided a policy template for the abjection of other welfare subjects (Tyler 2013; Mayblin et al. 2019; Humphris 2019). Alongside this, there has been a rise across many regions of nationalist, anti-immigration movements and parties in which welfare chauvinism – blaming immigration for declining social provision – has been a central theme. Social policy as a discipline is not alone in its neglect. A Royal Historical Society report (Atkinson et al. 2018) arrived at similar conclusions. British criminology has also been held to account (Phillips et al. 2020), as has sociology (Hesse 2014). It is in these contexts that academics and students in the social and political sciences and humanities have recently put forward demands to ‘Decolonise the Curriculum’ (Bhambra et al. 2018; Rhodes Must Fall 2018).

While this marginalization is specific to both race and racism, where it is most marked, there are corresponding trends with other critiques. Far-reaching as they were, the earlier feminist analyses lost their ‘bite’ in mainstream social policy over subsequent decades (Williams 2016). No surprise, then, that in a review of the discipline Ann Orloff comments that, while the debates between feminists and mainstream scholars in comparative social policy have been productive, ‘yet the mainstream still resists the deeper implications of feminist work, and has difficulties assimilating concepts of care, gendered power, dependency and interdependency’ (Orloff 2009: 317; emphasis added). More recently and more specifically, Mary Daly and Emanuele Ferragina (2018) note the lack of integration of comparative family policies research into comparative studies of the welfare state and of austerity. Without this, they argue, not only are particular struggles around equality lost from analysis, but so are the connections of the shifts in social and cultural values and the ways family policies reinforce measures such as targeting, fiscalization or workfare. Set this against a broader political context, in which the gender pay gap, gender violence, everyday sexism, reproductive justice, and (more recently) inadequate recognition of paid and unpaid care work are high on the agenda of feminist organizations such as the Fawcett Society, Southall Black Sisters and Sisters Uncut (and see Campbell 2013; Olufemi 2020).

Other new perspectives emerging from struggles and research around disability, sexuality, migration, childhood and age also find themselves in specialist silos, obscuring their radical implications for social policy. The issue of the environment and climate change has been pushing hard to get on to the social policy agenda over the past two decades (Fitzpatrick and Cahill 2002; Fitzpatrick 2011, 2014; Snell and Haq 2014; Gough 2017; O’Neill et al. 2018). It has recently been given momentum by the arguments of Fitzpatrick (2014) and Gough (2017): that there is interdependence between social policies to improve the social infrastructure and the need to achieve sustainability. Social policy solutions are needed to ensure just adaption and mitigation policies, and social policy provision has itself to be delivered in a sustainable manner.