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Paper short abstract

This paper examines welfare calculus—the moral and material reasoning through which people determine what they need and can claim—in the context of shrinking welfare states and social precarity. It emphasises how social protection is enacted and challenged from below.

Paper long abstract

In contexts characterised by shrinking welfare states, polarised discourses of deservingness, and governance based on quantification, how do people determine what they need, what they can claim, and what they owe to others? This paper introduces the concept of welfare calculus to explore the moral and material reasoning through which individuals and households navigate social protection from below. Rooted in extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Setúbal, a post-industrial city in southern Portugal, the paper draws on interviews, participant observation, and institutional encounters across municipal offices, parish charities, and informal care networks. In this climate of austerity and fragmentation, formal welfare systems intersect with vernacular infrastructures of obligation — such as neighbourhood credit, kin-based redistribution, and reputational judgments — creating complex moral landscapes of survival.

Instead of viewing welfare access solely as a technical matter of eligibility, the paper demonstrates how individuals perform moral worth, narrate needs, and strategically manoeuvre within discretionary systems. These acts of welfare calculus involve biographical storytelling, emotional regulation, and the moral labour required to make claims understandable and legitimate. Women frequently emerge as central figures in this process, acting as mediators between formal entitlements and informal care responsibilities. By examining how welfare is calculated and interpreted in lives characterised by precarity, this paper adds to debates on grassroots welfare, moral economies, and the redefinition of social protection amid crises. It contends that these everyday negotiations are not marginal but reveal the moral infrastructure through which welfare is enacted, contested, and sustained from the grassroots level.