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- Convenors:
-
Tessa Bonduelle
(Leiden University)
Anouk de Koning (University of Amsterdam)
Heath Cabot
Send message to Convenors
- Chairs:
-
Tessa Bonduelle
(Leiden University)
Heath Cabot
- Discussant:
-
Anouk de Koning
(University of Amsterdam)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Friday 26 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This panel examines how actors in and alongside the state reimagine welfare and remake its futures as things fall apart. Studying the provision of essential social services as things fall apart casts a light on imagination and creation in state-sanctioned spaces and may prefigure future realities.
Long Abstract:
Across Europe and beyond, welfare states are falling apart. In the face of volatile economies, growing precarity, and increasingly conflictual diversity, welfare states show themselves to be unable to live up to earlier social contracts, to a sedimented set of expectations and assumptions vis-à-vis the state. This panel brings together ethnographic case studies that examine how actors in and alongside the state are reimagining welfare and remaking its futures. Anthropologists have long looked to social movements and grassroots initiatives for radical alternatives to existing governing arrangements. The work of imagination and refashioning done in less radical, state-sanctioned spaces has received much less attention, even though these are likely to prefigure future realities.
We ask: how do actors (local councils, municipalities, schools, charities, NGOs, churches, community groups, social enterprises, etc.) (re)imagine the welfare state, the social contract, and socio-political worlds more generally, as they provide essential social services related, for instance, to food, housing, health or education? Where established welfare arrangements are not providing answers to human emergencies, what actors emerge to take up what kind of public roles, and for whom? And how do projects and policies that claim to do welfare “differently,” recast governing traditions, welfare structures and social imaginaries in their day-to-day implementation? What new settlements do such efforts envision and elaborate? What welfare futures do they prefigure, in practice?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 26 July, 2024, -Tessa Bonduelle (Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
As the UK’s social security system fails to ensure food, fuel, and housing security, local councils provide what I call “meantime welfare” – projects presented as temporary forms of aid. I argue that such meantime welfare produces unruly communities amidst a palpable absence of the welfare state.
Paper long abstract:
In the UK, the ongoing cost-of-living crisis has seen food and fuel insecurity deepen and spread into previously secure middle classes. An increasing number of people are now facing basic needs crises that don’t seem to be going away. As key actors of welfare provisioning in the UK, local councils are attempting to address residents’ unmet needs. In the context of a national social security system that is consistently failing to ensure food, fuel, and housing security, local councils provide what I call “meantime welfare.” Limited in their ability to ensure that residents have sufficient resources to provide for themselves, local councils fund projects presented as temporary forms of aid. What sociopolitical relations does such meantime welfare produce?
Focusing on a council-funded Food Hub in a London borough, I track the unruliness of meantime welfare, exploring how the Food Hub transformed relations in a diverse working class neighbourhood through the creation of an unprogrammed “community” that spans generations, abilities, classes, ethnic and racial difference. Many have written about the ways in which welfare governs through communities (Rose 1996). Yet the unruly ways by which “community” emerges and generates “the welfare state” remains underexplored. I show how this Food Hub evolved from a food aid distribution node to a volunteer-focused community. Rather than bringing the welfare state to the neighbourhood, I argue that this Food Hub – and the logics of meantime welfare that shape it – instead brought about a collective arrangement from which the welfare state was palpably absent.
Alexandra Szőke (Centre for Economic and Regional Studies) Tünde Virág (Centre for Economic and Regional Studies) Judit Keller (Center for Economic and Regional Studies)
Paper short abstract:
Through analysing the ascendance of a charity as they become the dominant political player in poverty management in Hungary, we show the possibilities and limitations of faith-based actors to introduce alternative modalities of social integration within the current semi-authoritarian context.
Paper long abstract:
The Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta plays a significant role in providing welfare services in the most marginalised places in Hungary. Churches and faith-based organizations (FBOs) have become important actors in provision of welfare across the globe, as states have outsourced responsibilities to a range of non-state institutions. In Hungary’s conservative, illiberal, ‘Christian’ political climate, churches and FBOs enjoy more autonomy and government support than the state’s own institutions. Since 2010 there has been increased welfare support for segments of the middle classes, punitive anti-poor measures, the dismantling of public services, decreasing social support and, in the most disadvantaged settlements, abandonment of state responsibilities. The case of this FBO is significant not only because it fulfils important welfare provision roles previously undertaken by the state, but also because it has a national policy making position. Through its role as the leader of a nation-wide social integration programme, it not only decides on the participant organisations and target settlements, but is also in a position to advance alternative more inclusive methods and approaches to poverty alleviation that run counter to the state’s dominant mode. At the same time, in a semi-authoritarian climate, their closeness to state power leads to a replication of clientalism and the differentiation between ‘favoured’ and ‘unfavoured’ actors, characteristic of the Hungarian polity. We draw on more than a decade of ethnographic and policy research into the charity’s various programmes and political ascendancy.
Martha Kapazoglou (Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
While the state remains a central welfare actor in Greece, mounting demands for help and scarce resources prompt a rethinking of the social contract. Focusing on interactions between municipal frontline professionals and those they serve, the paper explores how the social contract is reconfigured.
Paper long abstract:
Despite a decade of austerity policies, the welfare state remains a key reference through which the Greek social contract is imagined. In Thessaloniki, residents living in precarity turn to local state services for help, even if the latter’s resources are limited. However, an increasing mismatch between rising demands and scarce resources prompt a rethinking of the Greek social contract in practice. The expectations and assumptions about state-society relations underpinning it are being reassessed: what should the state provide and to whom, and what are people’s responsibilities and duties?
Focusing on interactions between municipal frontline workers and the people they serve, this paper explores how the Greek social contract is reconfigured. It follows how frontline municipal workers in Thessaloniki, manage and allocate available resources, and what logics guide decisions about whom to prioritize and whom to help in the face of scarcity. It shows that frontline workers’ logics and decisions reconfigure responsibilities and duties in practice. For example, people are expected to show up consistently at food distributions, otherwise they get suspended and in some cases even taken off the list of registered beneficiaries. It is, also, presumed that people ought to be informed about available services and the appropriate processes through which to access them. Those turning up last minute, when they find out that food or other basic goods are being distributed, are usually denied help.
Francesca Vaghi (University of Glasgow) Ellen Stewart (University of Glasgow)
Paper short abstract:
Retrenchment of the welfare state in the UK has coincided with growth in the visibility and role of NHS charities. We trace processes through which NHS charities supplement (or outright replace) established welfare arrangements, through a distinctive everyday pragmatism.
Paper long abstract:
The UK’s welfare state has progressively shrunk in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and amid ongoing austerity policies since the 2010s. Emblematic of this trend is the National Health Service (NHS), which for years has been considered to be in a state of crisis, but which is, since the COVID-19 pandemic, struggling with growing waiting lists and entrenched industrial disputes.
In this context, there has been a remarkable growth in the visibility and role of NHS charities. These organisations have long existed to supplement state funding of healthcare in the UK (via local fundraising and voluntary activities, such as capital appeals to buy additional equipment, provide non-clinical services, and fund patient and staff wellbeing initiatives), and debate on whether the services they provide are simply ‘add-ons’ or ‘essential’ has become particularly pressing. Based on a focused ethnographic study of an NHS charity in England, this paper examines the emergence of NHS charities as key actors in the UK’s mixed economy of welfare. Exploring this topic through the lens of affect, particularly Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’ (2011), highlights that NHS charities sustain daily practices that supplement (or outright replace) established welfare arrangements, and create spaces where alternatives, such as ‘fugitive coproduction’ (Stewart 2021), can flourish. The paper thus argues that NHS charities, and those who work and volunteer for them, enact an everyday pragmatism that seeks to address growing gaps in welfare provision, in ways that are very often creative, local, public, and also intimate.
Alice Daquin (Graduate Institute of Geneva)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on an ethnography in a banlieue of Marseille to shed light on the role of mothers, a key but understudied set of gendered intermediaries, who negotiate and implement social assistance and hence, contribute to transforming the imaginary of the French state at its urban margins.
Paper long abstract:
This paper engages with a sub-set of actors – mothers - who participate in negotiating and redefining the limits of the welfare state in French urban peripheries. I draw on an ethnographic study conducted in 2021/2022 in a marginalized neighborhood of Marseille (France), among women of post-colonial immigrant background. In contrast with common studies focusing on the role of male public actors, my ethnography bridges political anthropology and gender studies to study the contemporary transformations of the French welfare state by taking everyday encounters with the state seriously. In this neighborhood, inhabitants are dependent on welfare assistance, yet suspicious about an opaque state which imposes an ever-increasing administrative burden on them. Social rights are no longer a given but are up for negotiation with an assemblage of state and non-state actors (de Koning et al. 2023).
I conducted my ethnography among local mothers who integrate this assemblage as key intermediaries at the margins of the state (Das et Poole 2004). I illustrate how their everyday acts such as administrative arrangements, political bypasses, and food parcel distributions, rely on their ability to produce intimacy with the municipality, social landlords and charities. Mothers integrate these actors into the neighborhood’s relationships of reciprocity, thus bringing back the state within reach. Their everyday practices are thus transforming the imagined topography of the state, which is no longer seen as a distant and overhanging entity, as Fergusson and Gupta (2002) have described it, but as a relational fabric in which some residents regain a grip.
Edouard Zeller
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores an ongoing welfare experiment in Switzerland, where an Ecological Transition Income is offered to last-resort welfare recipients who can convincingly show they contribute to the ecological transition. The analysis is based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in an innovation hub.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores an ongoing welfare experiment in Switzerland: the 'Ecological Transition Income' (ETI). As an offshoot of the idea of a universal basic income, the experiment consists of citizens receiving income provided they convincingly commit to what becomes routinely invoked across Europe: 'the ecological transition'. This ETI is currently tested on a small cohort as a replacement of the 'insertion income', the last-resort welfare assistance in Switzerland's third largest canton. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on the design and implementation of this multi-million experiment, I dive into the backstage of a third sector renegotiating the social contract in a country that seeks to become a global leader in spearheading this ecological transition. By attending not only to the ‘innovators’ behind these welfare experiments but also to the individuals targeted and their experience, I ask what might be falling apart, in their view, as they strive to innovate and to labour as productive citizens. Furthermore, I consider what appears to fall apart from an ethnographic point of view in the backdrop of recent anthropological conversations on the transformation of European welfare states. To these debates, I suggest a complementary analytical angle exploring how the idea of an ‘ecological transition’ insinuates itself into welfare states’ transformation. This analysis is part of an ongoing ethnography of welfare experiments unfolding within an entrepreneurial hub in a major Swiss city, where ideals of innovation and entrepreneurship are mobilized to create new ways of governing productive citizenship in the era of environmental and ecological crises.
Venicia Sananes (Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines plans to build a social infrastructure that would assemble, facilitate, and fund a welfare community in every neighbourhood in Amsterdam. It traces the political imagination and roles of welfare actors that this state experiment entails and envisions.
Paper long abstract:
Like elsewhere in Europe, in the Netherlands, welfare state tasks have been devolved to the local level and unto what is imagined as an active and caring community. Such community-based welfare aspirations are thwarted by increasing precarity and sustained distrust of state institutions. Indeed, since 2023, bestaanszekerheid (“existential security”) has emerged as a central theme and the Netherlands, with a traditionally robust welfare state, has seen the triumph of far-right populist politics.
In this dilemmatic context of wanting to work with increasingly precarious and estranged communities to provide welfare in intimate ways, the municipality of Amsterdam introduces a seven-year long welfare program (2025-2032) aimed at restructuring the city’s sociale basis. Sociale basis is a nebulous and elusive policy term that encompasses the whole of organisations, services, facilities, and relationships that enable individuals to participate in society and care for one another in their neighbourhoods.
This paper examines the plans for the sociale basis as an attempt at social infrastructuring. The goal is to build a social infrastructure that would assemble, facilitate, and fund a welfare community in every neighbourhood. What political imagination does this state experiment entail? What state-society and state-citizen relations does it envision? And what are the roles of the myriad welfare actors contracted to repair and reinvent Amsterdam’s welfare infrastructure?
Natalia Gomez (University of Bologna)
Paper short abstract:
This study examines Colombia's implementation of Payment-by-Results schemes, focusing on Social Impact Bonds. It explores the implications of emphasizing measurable outcomes in social programs and the evolving roles of the state and private sectors in social protection.
Paper long abstract:
Unlike many European nations, Colombia has historically lacked a well-developed welfare state, primarily due to profound inequalities and a colonial legacy. International development programs and local policies for social provision and protection have attempted to address some of its problems, often with limited success. Currently, approximately 36% of the population lives in poverty, 13% in extreme poverty; meanwhile, unemployment hovers around 12%, while informal employment around 50%.
In response, in recent years, the country has turned to payment-by-results (PbR) schemes, particularly Social Impact Bonds (SIBs), for reconfiguring social protection programs. In these mechanisms private investors fund social interventions upfront, with the state reimbursing the investment, plus profits, if predefined targets are met. This model posits a shift in social program implementation, with the promise of fostering greater efficiency and innovation in social service delivery.
In this paper, I analyze the transformative potential of PbR schemes in Colombia using ethnographic evidence. I focus on the experiences of beneficiaries of SIBs, designed to promote formal employment among vulnerable populations, and on the practices of professionals implementing them. I explore the consequences of prioritizing measurable outcomes, such as a certain number of job placements, over meaningful social impact. I highlight the role of SIBs in reframing state responsibilities and private sector engagement in welfare provision, and offer insights into the broader global discourse on privately-funded alternative welfare strategies in the face of state inefficiency and fiscal constraints.
Charlotte van der Veen (Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
Experts by experience are expected to craft horizontal relations and restore trust in Dutch welfare provision. This paper traces what happens to these promises in the context of decentralized welfare landscapes in which their role is increasingly institutionalized.
Paper long abstract:
Experiential expertise is employed to transform top-down, paternalist forms of care. It stipulates horizontal and de-pathologizing repertoires and relations, suggesting radically different modes of community care and of understanding the self. Experiential expertise gained prominence in the 1970s, in the context of the antipsychiatry and client movement, prefiguring horizons built on peer support, in which psychiatry’s narratives of chronicity are rejected.
Experts by experience are increasingly central to new welfare models in the Netherlands, in the context of a move to governing through community in decentralized welfare landscapes. Experiential expertise is understood as a tool to build horizontal relations and an instrument to address social issues, such as an increasing demand for mental health care. But to what extent is experiential expertise able to make good on its transformative promises?
In this paper, I analyze two examples of the deployment of experts by experience in the Netherlands to trace the transformative potential of experiential expertise and the extent to which it can affect existing welfare institutions and care practices. The inclusion of experts by experience in social neighborhood teams provides insight into what happens when experiential expertise is institutionalized and co-opted into mainstream welfare policy. The case of a ‘self-direction center,’ where experiential expertise is the norm, illustrates the challenges of navigating institutional landscapes in which financial resources are always scarce and temporary. As such, this paper sheds light on the transformative potential as well as the pitfalls, of valuing and employing experiential expertise.
Heath Cabot
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the use of auditing mechanisms in the provision of grassroots care in Greece under austerity. Audit was key part of how "solidarity" was measured, imagined, and in some cases disciplined.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the use of auditing mechanisms in the provision of grassroots care in Greece under austerity. During the zenith of the “Greek solidarity movement” (2014-16), citizens initiatives emerged as ways of sorting and redistributing crucial resources, when state social services were radically cut back and even actively dismantled. These kitchens, groceries, networks, and pharmacies and clinics operated under the rubric of “solidarity,” and sought to function via antihierarchical, horizontalized formations. They worked variously to complement, “fill in,” reconfigure, and retrain the failing and often exclusionary welfare state. Even as they operated as a social movement, “from below” (Rakopoulos 2014), these initiatives engaged in mimesis and fraught dialogue with the State—and they often made use of state-like bureaucratic tools. This paper looks at one of these bureaucratic tools: audit and audit culture, which the social clinics/ pharmacies where I did research implemented to assess the extent to which they were (and were not) successful in instantiating solidarity. While audit is often associated with power imposed from “above,” in these sites auditing mechanisms (specifically, surveys) were a key part of how solidarity was measured, imagined, and in some cases disciplined.