Social Policy by Other Means: Theorizing Unconventional Forms of Welfare Production

Abstract

The goal of this special issue is to highlight the importance of unconventional social policies, theorize their development in comparison with traditional welfare state accounts and outline a new research agenda. In this introduction to the special issue, the editors present the concept of social policy by other means as encompassing two kinds of unconventional social policy (from the point of view of mainstream comparative research): First, functional equivalents to formal systems of social protection and, second, non-state provision of benefits. The concept builds upon a sizeable, but fragmented literature in comparative welfare state research. While numerous examples demonstrate that social policy by other means is more pervasive in both OECD and non-OECD countries than often acknowledged, a brief survey of the top 20 articles in the field reveals that this fact is not sufficiently reflected in the academic literature. With reference to both existing studies and the contributions to this special issue, the editors go on to explore (1) the different forms of social policy by other means, (2) explanatory theories and (3) their effectiveness in terms of social outcomes. They close by outlining a research agenda.     

Reconceptualizing financial innovation: frame,conjuncture and bricolage

Abstract

This article argues for a reconceptualization of financial innovation which, as culprit and victim of the current crisis, is now damned by those who once praised it. But what is financial innovation? The dominant answers from mainstream finance and social studies of finance share variations on a rationalistic view whereby financial innovation is about improving markets or at least extending the sphere of rational calculability. Because improvisation is more important than the dominant perspectives can admit, this article proposes a new concept of financial innovation whose three main elements – frame, conjuncture and bricolage – are indicated by the title of this article. The importance of this problem shift is that it highlights the inherent fragility of this type of intermediary-led financial innovation where things will often miscarry and highlights the need for a more radical rethinking about policy responses to the financial crisis that began in 2007.     

Varieties of Social Policy by Other Means: Lessons for Comparative Welfare State Research

Abstract

Scholars can take a broader look at social policy and understand that traditional public welfare state programs are only one of the many potential sources of social protection and regulation. The contributions of this special issue invite social policy scholars to explore policy instruments that provide “social policy by other means” across a wide array of areas, including agriculture, energy, immigration, taxation, and legal regulation of private benefits and services. The article provides a concise overview of some of the key theoretical and empirical implications of social policy by other means for comparative welfare state research. In order to do this, it is divided into two main sections, which respectively discuss the nature and boundaries of social policy and the varieties of social policy by other means. This is followed by a short conclusion, which summarizes the key lessons of this special issue for comparative welfare state research.     

Retrenchment of Social Policy by Other Means: A Comparison of Agricultural and Housing Policy in Turkey

Abstract

In many low- and middle-income countries, conventional welfare state institutions provide social protection only for the formally employed. In contrast, the rural and urban poor are often protected by “social policy by other means”. Based on a comparative analysis of two major unconventional welfare programs in Turkey, agricultural state support and access to squatter housing, this article explains retrenchment of social policy by other means. Agricultural retrenchment was the result of coercive policy transfer from international organizations in a post-crisis context, while the retrenchment of squatter housing was driven by domestic political entrepreneurs responding to decreases in the availability of urban land and the number of informal squatters. In both cases, retrenchment became politically sustainable due to functional replacement with more conventional welfare programs. This analysis challenges the narrow focus of mainstream welfare state research, provides an explanation of retrenchment of social policy by other means, and enhances our understanding of Turkey’s uneven welfare state development.     

Public‐private partnerships in international trade: a lobbying effort from passive to aggressive in the USA?

Public‐private initiatives have been the domain of many governments as they try to shape international trade for their countries. The research presented in this paper indicates that US international businesses are not satisfied with the passive role that has been assumed by the US government and current public‐private partnerships. The evidence suggests that US companies desire a more aggressive role for the federal government in the not too distant future. Public‐private partnerships will be less informational and play an active part in stimulating international trade throughout the world. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications     

Comparing Implementation of Internet Diffusion in the United States and France: Policies,Beliefs, and Institutions

Comparing Internet diffusion policies in the United States and France from an implementation perspective brings to light institutional and historical differences, even though both countries used the same top‐down approach. We find that France not only followed the technological lead of the United States in information technology but also emulated some of its more business‐oriented approaches in the implementation of the Internet, despite its own longstanding tradition of government intervention in industrial and commercial matters. This policy shift appears to be spurred by the global economy. Traditionally state‐controlled national economies are now increasingly leveraging private interests for successful industrial policy. When applying Sabatier and Jenkins‐Smith's advocacy coalition framework to the American and French diffusion of the Internet, we find policy communities actually expanding to private and public actors, including industry captains, legislators, and civil servants. These subsystems work together through classic lawmaking and lobbying under technological and economic constraints.     

Social Policy by Other Means from a Comparative Historical Perspective Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Belgium (1800 ‒1920)

ABSTRACT

While social policies in the past are “by other means” if compared to traditional welfare states, historians have successfully established that they were much more conventional in their own time. Moreover, welfare states are historically grown constructs often still containing many pre-existing elements of precisely such social policies by other means, for example non-state provision. Belgium is an excellent example. Historically both nineteenth-century poor relief and early twentieth-century social insurance were mixed private/public forms of provision and funding. Today the Belgian welfare state still retains fundamental aspects of non-state provision not usually associated with “conventional” welfare states in the core OECD.     

Race,Medicine, and Social Justice: Pharmacogenetics,Diversity, and the Case of BiDil

In this article, I probe an example of high‐technology medicine as a case study in the problems of the regulation of advancing technology. Specifically, I address the implications of pharmacogenomics—an emerging form of population‐based health care intervention—for public policies designed to eliminate racial disparities in health. Using the case of BiDil, a historical precursor to pharmacogenetic technology, I offer a framework for further studies of high‐technology medicine in which policy analysis is part of a social review based on the justice standard of ex ante mutual advantage. It is the contention in this article that the most just and reasonable deployment of pharmacogenomics is as a compensatory tool to alleviate health disparities.     

Experiments and evaluation of public policies: Methods,implementation, and challenges

Evidence-based policymaking is all about developing and implementing better public policies. Although the logic underpinning this philosophy is simple, the practicalities of demonstrating causal effects of a public policy are much more complex. In recent years, there has been a wave of optimism about the usefulness of experimental approaches to public policy evaluation which mimics the clean, causal inferences observed in clinical trials. Although these methods, such as randomised controlled trials, have been widely advocated and implemented, they are not without their potential problems. In this paper, we consider the strengths, weaknesses, and challenges posed by the revolution in policy evaluation brought about by embracing experimental methods.     

Business responses to environmental and social protection policies: toward a framework for analysis

This conceptual paper seeks to advance neo-institutional work that has traditionally portrayed environmental and social protection policies as constraints followed by businesses. Drawing from the policy sciences literature, we propose that in the United States, businesses tend to show increasing resistance as the protective policy process moves from initiation to selection and growing cooperation thereafter. Most importantly, we also contribute to the neo-institutional theory literature by positing that this inverted U-shaped policy process–business response relationship proposed for the U.S. context may be moderated by variations in the level of democracy, system of interest representation, regulatory approach, and national income.

The Diffusion of Human Trafficking Policies in the Post-Soviet Region: A Comparative Analysis of Policy Adoption in Ukraine,Latvia, and Russia

This paper analyzes how human trafficking policies diffused in the post-Soviet region. By adapting the diffusion of innovation framework to fit the international context, I examine whether human trafficking adoptions in the post-Soviet region were due to internal determinants and/or diffusion effects. A comparison of Russia, Latvia, and Ukraine found that internal determinants such as state commitment to human trafficking policy and interest group strength were more important to policy adoption than external pressures from the international community while state capacity and bureaucratic restructuring impeded policy adoption. I argue that policymaking, even in authoritarian regimes, is more nuanced than blind compliance with international treaties and shows that interest groups and policy entrepreneurs work within the constraints of national policymaking to adopt human trafficking policies.     

公共科技政策分析的理论进路：评述与比较

公共科技政策分析是一个颇具多样性的领域。新古典经济学、演化经济学、科学技术与社会研究、政策科学4种理论进路各有特点。新古典经济学的政策分析非常清晰,可提供直接的政策工具;演化经济学给予科技发展一种系统的理解,可得到科技发展的结构性制度安排;STS以宽阔的视野,在政策导向、科技行为的规范、政策对科技的建构等方面具有丰富的思想和措施含义;政策科学的分析关注政策系统,为改进政策过程提供认识基础。基于对4种理论进路共性与差异的比较,提出了一个公共科技政策分析的整合的概念框架。     

Feeding finance: a critical account of the shifting relationships between finance,food and farming

Abstract

Whether in the form of commodity index funds, farmland investment funds or commodities trading by agri-food companies, there is evidence of an increasingly close relationship between finance, food and agriculture. While these developments have received some critical attention of late, existing accounts of the ‘financialization of food’ are limited to the extent that they view finance as an external force with emphasis placed on the unnaturalness of its relationship with agriculture and its distortive effects on agricultural markets. Recognizing that finance and agriculture have a long history, this paper offers a more nuanced account of the place of financialization in the agricultural sector. Specifically, it examines how agriculture's emergence as an investment opportunity has reconfigured the terrain of agricultural interests and logics while creating new knowledge demands and agricultural visibilities. These dynamics are explored through a case study of the role of finance and processes of financialization in the recent demise of the Canadian Wheat Board as a state marketing agency. Through this discussion, the paper offers valuable insights into not only the reworking of agriculture as a particular type of financial space, but also the nature and limits of financialization itself as a way of engaging with the world beyond urban financial centres.     

Toward a Better Understanding of Politics: Linking Costs, Cultures, and Institutional Rules to Budgets

Books reviewed:
Aman Khan, Cost and Optimization in Government
Ronald F. King, Budgeting Entitlements: The Politics of Food Stamps
Steven G. Koven, Public Budgeting in the United States: The Cultural and Ideological Setting     

The National Context of Wicked Problems: Comparing Policies on Gun Violence in the US,Canada, and Australia

Scholars and practitioners have always been dogged by problems that are so complex that no practical solution appears to be possible. These have been referred to in the academic literature as “wicked” problems. However, it is possible that a problem’s “wickedness” depends in part on its context and on the vantage point of the observer, meaning that at least some aspects of wickedness can be thought of as being relative rather than absolute. In this article, the complex policy problem of gun control is examined across multiple national contexts to show how a problem that is perceived as being wicked in one jurisdiction can be seen as manageable in another.     

“Editorials at a Glance”: Cultural Policy,Gender, and Modernity in the World War I Bureau of Cartoons

Cultural policy during the Great War, rather than radiating from the central government, evolved from contemporary culture—propaganda, movies, and mass media. The state was a player, but quasi‐public organizations such as propaganda agencies, non‐state actors like the YMCA, and “public opinion” played important roles. The Committee on Public Information (CPI)—the government's propaganda committee—influenced Americans through books, advertisements, posters, and cartoons. This essay examines two of the CPI's efforts: the Bureau of Cartoons and the Division of Pictorial Publicity. In these materials, we can see the intersection of class‐based notions of gendered idealism and a developing media state's use of a sentimental culture of the Victorian middle‐class to represent and motivate the nation. With staff drawn primarily from advertising agencies and newspapers, the Committee's work shows how the formulation of cultural policy is the result of complex negotiated processes involving state interests, cultural liaisons, and ideological assumptions.     

Translating Policies into Informal Settlements' Critical Services: Reframing,Anchoring and Muddling Through

This paper examines how policies and plans are translated into informal settlements' practice. It builds on literature on policy implementation practice and organization studies, and more particularly, it applies the concepts of reframing, anchoring and muddling through. The paper is informed by the case of Kisumu City in Kenya and its Kisumu Integrated Solid Waste Management Plan and its implementation on Kisumu's informal settlements. The plan was funded by the Swedish International Development Agency through the United Nations Human Settlement Programme and implemented from 2007 to 2009. The study is based on action research carried out by a multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary group of researchers, through focus groups, participatory workshops, collaborative action, in‐depth interviews, document analysis and observations. The paper examines what original aspects of Kisumu Integrated Solid Waste Management Plan were translated, that is, which ones faded out and which ones became stabilized into and travel as ‘best practices’ to other locations. The paper shows how the generation of ‘best practices’ can be loosely coupled with the practices that policy seeks to change. It concludes, in line with previous research in the field, how successful policy implementation is based on cultural and political interpretations rather on evidence of improved practices. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ecomodernist citizenship: rethinking political obligations in a climate-changed world

Green accounts of environmental citizenship typically seek to promote environmental sustainability and justice. However, some green theorists have argued that liberal freedoms are incompatible with preserving a planetary environment capable of meeting basic human needs and must be wound back. More recently, ‘ecomodernists’ have proposed that liberalism might be reconciled with environmental challenges through state-directed innovation focused on the provision of global public goods. Yet, they have not articulated an account of ecomodernist citizenship. This article seeks to advance the normative theory of ecomodernism by specifying an account of ecomodernist citizenship and subjecting the theory’s core claims to sympathetic critique. We argue that state-directed innovation has the potential to reconcile ambitious mitigation with liberal freedoms. However, full implementation of ecomodernist ideals would require widespread embrace of ecophilic values, high-trust societies and acceptance of thick political obligations within both national and global communities. Ecomodernism’s wider commitments to cosmopolitan egalitarianism and separation from nature thus amount to a non-liberal comprehensive public conception of the good. Furthermore, ecomodernism currently lacks an adequate account of how a society that successfully ‘separates’ from nature can nurture green values, or how vulnerable people’s substantive freedoms will be protected during an era of worsening climate harms.