This article uses Taiwan as an example to examine how families manage work and care when the government and workplace provide limited support. Many Taiwanese households employ live-in migrant care workers to negotiate care responsibilities and adults’ paid jobs. Based on interviews with employers of live-in migrant care workers and workers, the findings demonstrate that daughters-in-law and occasionally daughters and sons become employers of live-in migrant care workers because of the limitation of public care services and lack of support they receive in seeking to combine paid work and family care responsibility. Even after employing migrant workers, women retain greater care responsibility in daily practices than their husbands. Hiring live-in migrant care workers also imposes risks to all parties involved in the processes of organising, coordinating, and providing care due to the uncertainty of care quality and the nature of care work.

A decade of austerity has amplified concern about who gets what from public services. The article considers the socio-economic and gendered impacts of cuts to local environmental services which have increased the need for citizens to report service needs and effectively ‘co-produce’ services. Via a case study of a UK council’s decade of administrative data on citizen requests and service responses, the article provides one of the first detailed analyses of the unfolding impact of austerity cuts over time on public service provision. It demonstrates the impact of austerity across the social gradient, but disproportionately on the least affluent, especially women. The article argues for the importance of detailed empirical examination of administrative data for making visible, and potentially tackling, long standing inequalities in public service provision.

Contracting of social services has been adopted in China as an innovation in welfare provision. This article reviews the emerging literature on contracting of services to social organisations in China in order to identify lines of further enquiry. It reviews research published in the English and Chinese languages up to 2018. We identify three distinct narratives: public sector reform, improvement of welfare service quality and capacity, and transformation of state-society relations. We contrast the identified narratives with the empirical evidence produced for the Chinese case. We demonstrate that, despite contradictory empirical evidence, the premise that contracting improves public sector efficiency and quality of services predominates. The narrative that contracting transforms state-society relations is contested. This article contributes to the understanding of how contracting of services is justified in theory and practice, and proposes an agenda for future social policy research on contracting of services to social organisations in China.

In the aftermath of the 2011 England riots, the then Prime Minister David Cameron referred to a ‘small number of families as the source of a large number of problems in society’ (Cameron, 2011). Soon after, the Troubled Families Programme was set up by the government to ‘turn around’ 120,000 troubled families. Despite government rhetoric focusing on ‘neighbours from hell’ (ibid.) the initial estimate of the number of troubled families did not include any indicators of problematic behaviours, such as crime or anti-social behaviour. Instead, a measure previously used by government to classify families with multiple social and economic disadvantages was used (Social Exclusion Task Force, 2007a). This article revisits the research behind the initial identification of the 120,000 troubled families and explores more widely the overlap between families with multiple social and economic disadvantage and their engagement in problematic behaviours. Our reanalysis of the original research data reveals that although families experiencing multiple social and economic disadvantage were at an increased risk of displaying problematic behaviour, only a small minority did so.

The article analyses over-time changes in family transfers in Hungary, Lithuania and Romania from 1990-2018 to seek evidence of similarity in the ethos of policy adaptation. Informed by recent scholarship signalling growing disparities in social entitlements along socio-economic lines in Hungary and Romania, the analysis assesses whether three decades of change in family transfers in three different policy contexts might exhibit the selective, pro-wealthy ethos of social policy transformation described. Using data from an original dataset drawing on exhaustive social legislation pertaining to family allowances, family tax breaks and paid parental leave-related transfers, the article shows that, for most of the last three decades, institutional dualisms in the protection of families with dependent children have grown. Policy drift undercuts the rights of the neediest and policy layering leads to programme expansion targeting dual-earner, high-income families especially. This trend has intensified over the last fifteen years and is most evident in paid leave schemes.

Climate change is arguably the defining issue of our time, with global impacts. Yet to date, scholarship within social policy has remained relatively fragmented and disparate, leaving an urgent need to start comprehensively embedding environmental thinking across all domains of the discipline (Williams, 2021). Responding to this challenge, this paper draws together existing work at the nexus of social policy, the environment, and climate change. The paper then presents findings from workshops held with social policy scholars, policymakers, and practitioners, using these discussions to propose pathways to embed climate change within the discipline. The paper represents a significant contribution to knowledge within the field as it seeks to both broaden discussions about social policy and climate change; to identify theoretical and empirical relationships that exist between the two fields but have not been fully recognised in existing scholarship; and to bring new perspectives and voices into the discussion.

The article discusses five literature strands’ approaches towards social protection systems in the context of climate crisis: Adaptive Social Protection, Just Transition, Green New Deal, Post-growth, and Eco-feminism. As we argue, these five strands are located on a spectrum between a green growth orientation and a green anti-capitalist orientation. Furthermore, they differ in terms of their problematisation of the climate crisis and have different perspectives on relevant actors, on world regions, and – most relevant in the context of social welfare – their conceptualisation of social protection. While Adaptive Social Protection emphasizes cash transfers and insurances, Green New Deal and Just Transition approaches focus more on redistribution and labour market policies, and Post-growth and Eco-feminist approaches more on universalist policies and systems. We argue that these literatures each have their weaknesses, but also offer urgent questions, concepts, and insights for further social policy research.

The recent polycrises of COVID-19, economic recession, and energy price increases have reinforced the critical importance of energy services – such as heating, information and communications technology, and refrigeration – to everyday societal functioning. Compromising access to these energy services, or energy poverty, limits social and economic development affecting education, health, and social participation. Energy poverty is impacted by climate change and climate-related policies – however, this nexus has been marginalised within social policy. We critically review literature at the intersection of climate change and energy poverty identifying policy approaches, tensions, and solutions of relevance for social policy. While tensions exist between efforts to mitigate climate change and energy poverty, climate-friendly mitigation of energy poverty requires better integration of social perspectives to disrupt current technical biases, recognising the characteristics and needs of individuals in energy poverty, and holistic governance approaches, especially involving the health and housing sectors.

‘Just transition’ is a concept originally developed by the labour movement to reconcile workers’ rights with the necessity to combat climate change. More recently, supra- and international organisations have also adopted this idea. However, it remains unclear to what extent these actors follow the eco-social ambitions of organised labour. In this article, we develop a conceptual framework to capture diverse just transition approaches by distinguishing between the goal, policy, and governance dimension. We apply a multi-method approach to gauge the extent of variation in the just transition conceptualisations of three actors: the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Union (EU). We identify a cleavage between the ILO where just transition refers to an ambitious eco-social agenda on the one hand, and the IMF’s emphasis on macroeconomic adaptation on the other. The EU takes up a middle position by promoting a ‘green growth’ strategy with medium emphasis on environmental and social risk mitigation.

Access to safe, clean and affordable water is a basic human right and a global goal towards which climate change poses new challenges that heavily impact the health and wellbeing of people across the globe and exacerbate or create new inequalities. These challenges are shaped by a number of geographical and social conditions that, apart from the risks of weather-driven impacts on water, include water governance and management arrangements in place, including pricing tariffs, and the interplay of social and economic inequalities. Building on examples from Australia, Scotland and England and Wales that illustrate access to water in different types of water provision systems, and regarding to aspects of access, quality and affordability, this paper explores the types of challenges related to water poverty in the context of climate crisis and reflects on the multiple dimensions of water poverty oriented social policy at the interplay of climate change associated risks.

The policy area addressing the climate crisis in the UK, ‘Net Zero’, will affect many aspects of people’s everyday life. Given that policy builds from where we are now, which for some (post austerity, and mid cost of living crisis) means in financial crisis, there is work to be done in enabling a socially inclusive Net Zero. In this article, we modify the Bristol Social Exclusion Matrix’s four forms of participation for social inclusion, drawing on the existing literature on the social risks of environmental policy, to articulate the risks of social exclusion in transition to Net Zero. This enables us to develop a ‘person-centred’ approach to understanding the risks of Net Zero, articulating the risks of exclusion, and who is likely to be affected by them. We conclude by outlining a framework for an inclusive transition, and commenting on the policy and research implications of our thinking.