Short Abstract

Amid shrinking state and aid systems, this panel explores how workers, migrants, and communities forge networks of welfare and mutual aid, reshaping power, challenging hierarchies, and reimagining development and solidarity from below.

Description

Amid a shifting global aid and development landscape, the provision of welfare and services is rapidly being delegated to or taken over by alternative actors and systems. From disaster recovery and community protection during conflict to the distribution of state benefits, ethnic, religious, and community-based organizations, diasporas, multinational corporations and NGOs are augmenting and supplementing the established social role of state and international aid actors. Their work often operates both within and against neoliberal and digitalized economies, where welfare is increasingly financialized, privatized, and mediated by technology.

This panel invites papers exploring how grassroots agency and everyday practices of survival and solidarity are reshaping the meaning of welfare and development in contexts where state support is limited and international aid is atrophying. It asks: Who provides social welfare in this rapidly changing and increasingly austere welfare and aid environment? Under what conditions do these systems reinforce or challenge existing hierarchies of gender, class, race, caste, and citizenship?

We are particularly interested in how marginalized groups mobilize within these fragmented welfare landscapes to negotiate livelihoods, assert rights, and create informal and often transnational mechanisms of care. By centring lived experiences and localized forms of social welfare, this panel contributes to reimagining development as a plural, relational, and contested field. It examines how power is reconfigured through everyday negotiations of care, how solidarity is forged across social divides, and how new visions of social welfare are emerging from below—offering alternative futures grounded in collective agency rather than state or market dominance.

This Panel has 3 pending paper proposals.
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