Participation in welfare legislation—A poverty‐aware paradigm

Abstract

Public participation, responsive regulation, and other policy formulations are intended to draw governments down from their ivory towers and into engagement with the people. However, they paint at best, a hazy picture of who “the people” are. This superficial representation is felt, among other collectives, by people living in poverty, who not only face hunger, often accompanied by poorer health and lower life expectancy, but whose social exclusion typically goes unrecognized by the authorities. The legal framing of poverty—and, as a result, states' policy approaches to its alleviation—focuses on the material core, representing a very thin conceptualization that fails to address the social dimension. Furthermore, practical avenues for incorporating citizens' views into lawmaking—which might enrich understanding—are lacking when it comes to people in poverty. Combined with a blatantly hegemonic stance, the resulting ignorance around poverty and “the poor” generates welfare laws that are woefully out of touch with reality, and legislative thinking that perpetuates, rather than alleviates, poverty. This paper seeks to make a twofold contribution: (i) to demonstrate this situation with a deep empirical inquiry into the legislative process of one legal provision within the Israeli welfare law regime, juxtaposed against qualitative field‐research findings and (ii) to introduce the inventive and groundbreaking “poverty‐aware” paradigm, constructed in social‐work discourse, to illuminate and explain the empirical findings and point to potential procedural–institutional reform, to pave the way for poverty‐aware legislation.

Poverty, social work, and radical incrementalism: Current developments of the poverty‐aware paradigm

“…The experience gained so far by the rehab staff with the PAP indicates that those new methods enabled them to reachout to people who had previously been regarded as incapable of being rehabilitated. The PAP in the justice system : Recently, the Ministry of Justice has developed specific PAP training for lawyers and judges who work in its three bodies dealing with people in debt – Legal Aid, the Commissioner of Insolvency Proceedings, and the Law Enforcement and Collection System Authority. The reputation of the PAP programs run by the Ministry of Welfare has led to interet in PAP by law scholars (Cohen‐Rimer, 2022) and policy makers. The need to have a PAP‐Law training was born after a new law passed in 2019—the Insolvency and Financial Rehabilitation Law—that marked a shift in the Ministry of Jutice's attitudes towards private debtors, from suspicion and surveillance to acknowledgment of the structural reasons beyond debotrs' own control that lie in the basis of many debts.…”