Where Has Welfare Gone? Introductory Remarks on the Geographies of Care and Welfare

Abstract

Where has welfare gone? Introductory remarks on the geographies of care and welfare Shortly after World War 2, T H Marshall (1950) argued that the provision of social welfare services was needed to sustain a polity in which individuals were capable of truly being citizens. During that same period, the apparatus of the modern welfare state was built to deliver those services (Schottland, 1967). The ways in which social welfare was provided in various countries reflected different strategies and ideologies concerning how best to achieve the social rights that Marshall identified, as well as how best to construct inclusive and just societies (Esping-Anderson, 1990). In the past decade, these welfare regimes have been the subject of reforms that have radically reshaped the relationships between individuals, families, citizens, communities, and states (Gilbert, 2002;Katz, 2001;Zijderveld, 1999). These reforms are the outgrowth of concerns that`something' was not working with the ways in which social welfare had been provided. Politicians and activists on both the right and the left pointed to the large numbers of people who seemed dependent on social welfare services, rather than enabled by them. The quality and cost of services were decried. And the polities within these countries seemed fragmented, atomized, and incapable or unwilling to act as citizens.Much of the debate over welfare focused on institutional structures, policies, and behaviors that limited the effectiveness of social welfare. Embedded in these debates, however, were competing moral philosophies concerning social justice and how justice might be enhanced. These were never just debates of philosophy or policy, of course. They were debates over geography: where welfare ought to be and what form it should take there; how places (for example, cities, households, regions, the nation) and movements (migrations, household reconfigurations, etc) ought to be constituted through the welfare state. The following set of papers discusses the implications of these philosophies and geographies for the ways that social welfare and care are provided and for the kinds of societies they enable. In this introduction, we will attempt to provide a framework through which these philosophies can be interpreted. We begin by situating the papers within geography through a very brief and admittedly partial consideration of the ways in which geographers have approached the study of welfare and care. We then outline a perspective towards social justice that highlights the significance of care and welfare in creating an inclusive society. Finally, we highlight the ways in which each of the papers addresses these issues and helps us to understand where welfare has gone in this era of retrenchment and decline. Geographies of welfareIn the 1960s, welfare geography was part of an attempt to create a relevant, socially aware scholarship that could inform policy decisions and other kinds of praxis (for example, Ha« gerstrand, 1970;Harvey, 1973;Morrill, 1969;. In conjunction with the ...

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