This article examines whether and to what extent legalised same-sex marriage can assist lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) people to develop family life and protect them from defamilisation and familisation risks. It focuses on the provision of and gaps in welfare for LGBTQ+ people since Taiwan’s same-sex marriage legalisation in 2019. A content analysis of online community discussions since marriage equality shows that local LGBTQ+ community discussions were filled with concerns about the lack of familial status for cross-border couples, lack of legal parental status and rights for same-sex parents, and questions about heteronormative values and kinship ties. This article reveals how heteronormative assumptions embedded in the policy system and in the wider society adversely influence LGBTQ+ people’s welfare, and identifies supplementary and alternative measures. It highlights the importance of providing universal basic services free from heteronormative biases and prioritising the well-being and rights of all citizens.

This paper investigates the intricate interplay between tax expenditures (TEs) and social policy. Leveraging the Global Tax Expenditures Database (GTED), we carry out the first data-driven comparative assessment of direct spending and TEs for social welfare across countries to shed light on this often-overlooked aspect of fiscal policy. Our research reveals prevalent TE usage for social purposes and substantial costs in terms of revenue forgone worldwide, averaging over 1 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 6 per cent of tax revenue. Our analysis showcases varying strategies employed by countries, particularly emphasizing the reliance of high-income economies on TEs granted through personal income taxes, and low/middle-income countries predominantly using value-added tax-related TEs for social objectives. Our results also highlight the importance of functions such as housing in contributing significantly to social spending through TEs with the ratio tax expenditure/direct spending reaching roughly 365 per cent in the US and 203 per cent in France. Hence, our study underlines the necessity for meticulous evaluation and efficient design of TEs to better align TE regimes with governments social policy objectives as well as to minimise unintended social or economic consequences.

The respective delivery roles of public and private providers is a key battleground in the ongoing transformation of welfare states. But despite a burgeoning literature on public attitudes to aspects of welfare state activity, delivery has to date received scant attention. This article makes a first step in addressing this knowledge gap. Drawing on original survey data from the United Kingdom, it analyses attitudes towards the delivery of social policies and explores their relationship to other welfare attitudes. We show that views on delivery display less variation than attitudes to welfare generosity and redistribution, that public support for private sector involvement in delivery is limited to certain fields and that there is very little consistent support for outright privatisation. The article thus demonstrates that there is very little congruence between attitudes to ‘welfarism’ and attitudes to ‘statism’.

This article focuses on how the policy on same-sex marriage and a person’s social locations impact upon Chinese lesbians’ life chances and welfare. Bringing the familisation and defamilisation literature, which has predominantly focused on heterosexual populations and families, into dialogue with an intersectionality perspective, we map the ways in which gender, sexuality, and class intersect in shaping lesbians’ experiences of defamilisation and familisation risks. The findings, drawn from interviews conducted in Beijing, China, reveal that the absence of legalised same-sex marriage, coupled with a lack of familial and societal recognition of same-sex relationships, exposes lesbians to both defamilisation and familisation risks, leading to difficulties in choosing whether and how to participate in the family. The intersectionality lens guides us to move beyond the heterosexual/homosexual boundary and to rethink the possibility of welfare alliances that can improve the welfare of not only lesbians but also other groups of women and minorities.

Activation policies, especially formal upskilling, can strengthen social inequality among long-term unemployed people. Also, receiving skill-enhancing activities may be at odds with the ‘work first’ principle. Drawing on interviews with frontline workers in the Norwegian employment and welfare service (NAV), this article analyses how frontline workers handle the challenging aspects arising from activation policies in providing enabling activities to claimants who need comprehensive support. The findings suggest that frontline workers face claimants who expect to embark on an education, and on the contrary, claimants who lack motivation or capability to do so. In both cases, frontline workers are challenged in terms of experiencing contradictory expectations from policies and users and in assessing future outcomes and suitability of the services. Education activities provided by the public employment agency (PES) involves multiple policy fields and require specific competency on the part of frontline workers.

Globally, resettlement is considered one of the most durable solutions for refugees. The UK has introduced a Community Sponsorship Scheme that enables communities to resettle refugee families providing them with enhanced integration support aided by volunteers. This paper investigates the nature of integration support that sponsored refugees receive utilising the analytical framework of UK’s Indicators of Integration (IoI). Data was collected from interviews with refugee adults resettled in diverse and less diverse areas. Our findings illustrate the importance of support given by volunteer groups to enable access to resources and connections. We establish that there is much potential for sponsorship programmes to add value to refugee support suggesting that the current expansion of sponsorship from its Canadian roots may help facilitate refugee integration. However, further research is needed to uncover the long-term experiences of sponsored refugees and to compare their outcomes to those of forced migrants arriving via different mechanisms.

This paper argues that young people who claim state support in the UK are prone to accept the contemporary hegemonic conceptualisation within advanced capitalist societies, that individual behaviour and mindset are the key determinants of valorised labour market outcomes. The notion that the self is all encompassing and one can, and should, choose to overcome all challenges in life through self-improvement is particularly salient for recent generations of young people. Social policy reinforces this trend by encouraging changes in the individual to combat structural problems, and such ideology is present in the contemporary intensification of welfare conditionality. This paper draws upon secondary analysis of longitudinal qualitative data generated as part of the Welfare Conditionality Project (2013–2019) to demonstrate that young people who experience welfare conditionality are likely to individualise pathways to their future aspirations.

This study extends debates on implications of informal welfare for population health and well-being. It examines whether cultural and ideational precepts such as social capital, affect enrolment in National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) among people living with chronic disease(s) in Ghana. It also explores how NHIS enrolment explains the association between social capital and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) using empirical data from five regions in Ghana. Results indicate that bonding social capital was associated with HRQoL. Bridging and linking social capital were positively and negatively associated with enrolment in NHIS, respectively. Enrolment in the NHIS explained the relationships of trust in neighbours, bridging and linking social capital with HRQoL. Thus, while social capital can improve HRQoL of people living with chronic disease(s), it does so by, among others, influencing their participation in formal health protective services. Culturally driven informal welfare resources are critical to making formal programmes meaningful to people.

The COVID-19 pandemic destabilised the political, social, and economic life of countries as it spread around the world. It posed multiple threats to individuals, societies, and across different domains of life, highlighting their intersectionality and uneven impacts. The paper focuses on the UK and South Korea, countries which took very different paths in framing and addressing the crisis. It draws on secondary data and an integrated critical human security and state capacity approach to compare how state responses, institutional capacity, and the mobilisation of policy instruments themselves construct constellations of insecurity which intersect with human security and vulnerability. It will demonstrate the structural constraints that have continued to shape vulnerability and the dynamics of human security and insecurity in turbulent times.

This article explores the effects of language hierarchies within SFI (Swedish for Immigrants) and LINC (Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada) national integration programmes and how discourses of civic integrationism framed around monolingualism and neoliberalism position adult migrant students in the liminal spaces between belonging and othering. Based on research findings obtained during multiple case study fieldwork in Finland and Canada, I examine the underlying norms and subtexts upon which practices of host language acquisition are founded. How students are positioned depends greatly on who serves as an arbiter over which expressions of linguistic diversity are deemed beneficial or obstructive to integration. Migrant liminality within integration educations could be debilitating while simultaneously fostering resistance in transgressing and reimagining essentialist integration policy and pedagogical goals, thus creating opportunities for transformation.

Guided by Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical approaches of symbolic capital and symbolic violence, this article examines the everyday mechanisms of ‘otherising’ language practices in schools that reinforce racism against marginalised youths in Sweden. The empirical material is based on focus group discussions and individual in-depth interviews with youths with migrant backgrounds in Sweden. The stories told by the participants in this study indicate how young people with immigrant backgrounds are discursively racialised and otherised as a group that does not belong to Swedish society, through the articulation of negative opinions, attitudes, and ideologies as part of established colonial discourses. It is argued that the marginalisation of migrants in Sweden, which is a consequence of social policy, has even resulted in utilisation of a marginalised language — one that deviates from the majority language in several different ways.

This article analyses burnout in governmental psychosocial and community programmes considering training/knowledge, the technical-professional field, the institutional framework, and networking, based on the experience of the intervention teams of three Chilean programmes. A qualitative methodology was used. Fifty people, most of them psychologists, participated in interviews and focus groups. The data were analysed according to Grounded Theory. Results indicate that burnout is a corrosive process in governmental psychosocial and community programmes. The causes of burnout are related to three gaps: between academic training and professional performance, between formulation and implementation, and between the obligation to work as part of a network and the limitations of this approach. Furthermore, we observed manifestations consequences and effects of burnout, and guidelines for improving the programmes. We discuss the institutional dimension of burnout in governmental psychosocial and community programmes and reflect on aspects that may improve team well-being and the quality of social policies.

The UK welfare landscape is increasingly challenging due to ongoing austerity involving public sector cuts, service retrenchment, and withdrawal of statutory responsibilities. This article shows that as the welfare state contracts, precarity increases and responsibility for service provision is progressively devolved to front-line individuals and service users. To illustrate, the article examines the use of assistive and everyday technologies to improve social housing residents’ quality of life based on a longitudinal mixed methods study conducted between 2020 and 2022. The findings highlight how housing providers can support person-led technology interventions for older residents, where minor improvements positively impact day-to-day living. However, interventions are often limited by practicalities, capacity, and cost. This article connects technological engagement in housing to the ongoing ‘responsibilisation’ of many areas of housing provision to social landlords and tenants. This suggests an extension of responsibility where social housing providers are papering over the cracks in the welfare state.

In 2022, the Welsh Government announced a basic income pilot for care leavers in Wales. This article uses this policy experiment to provide an insight into the relationship between devolution and social citizenship. This article makes two claims. First, the basic income pilot is part of an approach the Welsh Government has taken over the past twenty years to expand the idea of social citizenship to include rights to money. This is justified by a principle of progressive universalism, but this principle also has a wider UK context. Second, the financial constraints imposed by the UK Government frustrates the extent to which the Welsh Government can turn such experiments into reality.

In the UK, food banks and other forms of food aid have become a normalised support mechanism for those living at the sharp end of poverty. Drawing from accounts of those who have used, worked, and volunteered in two of England’s food banks during the Covid-19 pandemic, this article explores some of the key challenges that emerged for food aid during this unique period. In documenting these experiences, the paper concurs with previous work that has identified the expanding role of food banks in providing core welfare support, suggesting an increasingly extended welfare function of food aid. This has implications for understanding the effectiveness of welfare – and the appropriateness of our reliance on voluntary aid – in the post-pandemic period.

Improving community attitudes and behaviours is core to improving inclusion for people with disability. To identify ways to achieve such change, we analysed data from qualitative interviews with sixty-one expert stakeholders in Australia, informed by our preceding literature review on effective interventions. We identified five themes describing factors with the potential to change attitudes and behaviours to improve inclusion and reduce discrimination: ensuring people with disability have active presence across all life domains; leadership by people with disability, together with organisational and governmental leadership that values the diverse contribution of people with disability; a holistic approach to policy and interventions that targets multiple levels of change; long-term and adequately resourced initiatives to achieve structural and sustained change; and commitment to measuring and monitoring change interventions, to inform decisions and maintain accountability.

Despite significant evidence that age is an important factor in homelessness, life course considerations have not been systematically incorporated into the most influential theories of the factors that heighten the risk of becoming homeless. To address this oversight, this article examines variations in the risk of transitioning into homelessness among single adults in Dublin, Ireland. Consideration is given to how these transitions are shaped by the interaction between life course stage and changing personal circumstances, experiences, and relationships. It reveals that while some triggers of homeless, such as leaving institutional or private rented accommodation, are common experiences among all age groups, younger and older adults both experience distinct patterns of transition into homelessness. This understanding can help to strengthen the traditionally weak evidence base for homelessness prevention strategies, and in particular inform the design of targeted measures, that address the specific homelessness risks faced by some age groups.

The role of housing in providing a welfare asset has been widely explored. With the growth in home ownership between 1979 and 2008 and erosion of the welfare state, housing wealth has become part of the welfare mix in the UK. Here, we present analysis of housing outcomes, as measured in the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS), among people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual in Great Britain. This shows that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people have poorer housing outcomes than heterosexual counterparts: they are less likely to be homeowners; more likely to be private renters; and more likely to be social renters. With growing intergenerational inequalities in access to home ownership, we argue that, as openly LGB (and broader trans and queer) people being on average younger than the rest of the population, this could lead to LGB people, as a group, being excluded from asset-based welfare in the future as they age.