This paper draws together the connections between the concepts of critical human security and state capacity and explores their relevance as a novel analytical framework for exploring the global pandemic and its aftermath, with a particular focus on Europe and East Asia. The paper highlights the relevance of integrating a ‘state capacity for human security’ analytical lens and policy philosophy to inform an understanding of human (in)security as well as its relevance for concerns around social protection, sustainability, and inequality. We argue that the long-held and taken-for-granted assumption that larger, high-spending welfare states produce greater well-being security can no longer be an automatic supposition given the nature and sources of risk and insecurity in the contemporary world. We argue that that widening the parameters and focus of social policy analysis towards state capacity for critical human security might better highlight the multi-dimensional challenges that welfare states should seek to address.

We apply a synthesis review to revisit the concept, measurement, and operationalisation of social inclusion and exclusion in the context of comparative social policy, integrating the vast literature on the concepts, with the aim of elucidating a clearer understanding of the concepts for use by scholars and policymakers around the planet. In turn, we outline the conceptual development of the concepts, how they have been operationalised through social policy, and how they have been measured at the national and individual levels. Through our review, we identify limitations in extant conceptualisation and measurement approaches and suggest directions for refining conceptual and measurement frameworks to enhance their utility in social inclusion policy, emphasising the concepts’ multidimensional, multilevel, dynamic, and relational essence and highlighting their connection to related concepts such as social capital, social integration, and social citizenship.

The article examines the relationship between perceived distributive justice and trust in the welfare system within complex and self-contradictory policy setting. Based on thirty-three in-depth interviews with social assistance users in Poland and Czechia, we find that policy assemblages in those countries are experienced as confusing ‘institutional enigmas’. We identify four patterns linking perceptions of welfare system’s distributive justice and trust in this context: perceived rationality of the system combined with trust; perceived lack of system’s empathy combined with distrust; concerns about ‘undeserving claimants’ overusing the system linked to distrust in welfare system; and unexpected (non)receiving of benefits causing surprise and shaping (dis)trust. We argue that in contradictory institutional embedding, achieving users’ trust is challenging due to complex distributive justice principles they adhere to and numerous instances of those principles being violated. Trust can still be fostered when users are well informed or experience receiving meaningful support.

Citizen trust in public institutions has become a major concern for policy makers, but how institutional design affects institutional trust is not entirely clear. Existing research has mainly focused on the macro-level of welfare regimes or on the micro-level of citizens’ or frontline workers’ attributes. Our knowledge about interrelations between organisational aspects of welfare delivery and (dis)trust-formation at the meso-level of institutional design remains scarce. In the article, we investigate how users experience institutional fragmentation and how this impacts their trust in the welfare system. Based on forty-three interviews with social assistance users in Germany and Poland, we demonstrate that fragmentation is indeed relevant as an experiential context for (dis)trust-formation. However, we found that low institutional fragmentation is not, per se, trust-promoting and that higher fragmentation can be a driver for developing trust in individual caseworkers. Citizens’ perceptions of procedural justice and experienced administrative burdens are discussed as possible mediators.

Focusing on the metropolitan cities of Seoul, Korea and London, England, this paper seeks to provide a better understanding of the role of cities and local social policy in addressing responses to and impacts of the pandemic, as well as in governing a place-based approach to pandemic recovery, human security, and inclusive and sustainable growth. It draws on a critical human security perspective and the application of a multi-scalar governance and territorial matrix for local social policy and social infrastructure to highlight the complex and multisectoral social and public policy challenges facing both Seoul and London in the aftermath of the pandemic as well as the overlapping, intersectional, and multi-layered insecurities, how they have evolved and strategies to address them. The study draws on secondary data sources, workshops, and qualitative interviews with key city stakeholders in both cities conducted between February 2022 and July 2023.

Decisions about how to draw one’s pension are complex. Individuals with poor pension literacy may risk making suboptimal decisions, especially in the absence of financial advice. This study found actual and perceived pension literacy to have opposite effects on advice seeking. Where high actual pension literacy increased the propensity to seek advice, high perceived pension literacy decreased it. After participants completed a test of pension literacy, they became aware of their pension knowledge, and some changed their minds about seeking advice. The study highlights the importance of pension education and has implications for regulators and industry professionals wanting to increase the uptake of financial advice.

Discussions about economic equality have, in recent years, extended beyond considerations of income distribution to encompass the distribution of wealth and its intergenerational transfer. Driven by new and more frequent data, a better understanding is emerging of the concentration of wealth within society and the dynamics of its transfer between generations.

This article contributes to that discussion by assessing the economic and social rationales for the taxation of intergenerational wealth transfers. It outlines the social policy case for inheritances taxes grounded in vertical equity principles. Then it presents comparative data on household wealth across high-income European countries before focusing on one of these, Ireland, to consider whether current inheritance taxation policies counter or perpetuate these inequalities. Focusing on that system, the article explores a range of inheritance taxation reforms intended to address wealth inequality while providing recurring funds for public services and redistribution.

This paper focuses on the discursive connection between the notion of autonomy and the ageing-in-place policy approach, in a context of population aging and budgetary restraint. We argue that these central elements of the policy discourse on ageing represent a governance strategy that defines ageing in place as the prevailing standard for ageing well. Through an analysis of ageing policy documents released by the Québécois government between 2012 and 2023, this paper shows a disconnect between national policy frameworks and the reality of ageing in place. The issue of ageing in place is strongly bound up with the idea of autonomy, which is mainly expressed in terms of responsibility and freedom of choice, while its implementation overlooks the social structural determinants of individual autonomy and their impact on older people’s opportunities and processes of ageing in place.

Market failure, around credit provision, typically centres on adverse selection and moral hazard. We utilise a Diverse Economies Framework to distinguish between different types of lender (mainstream, alternative, and non-market) and neoclassical economic theory as an analytic framework to introduce three additional forms of market failure – diseconomies of small scale, externalities, and excess demand and oversupply. This suggests market failure in the UK sub-prime consumer credit market is more comprehensive than previously recognised, increases the argument for government intervention and points to four policy responses – public subsidies, patient capital, regulation, and taxation – to complement and supplement market responses. Without support, not-for-profit sub-prime lenders, such as Community Development Finance Institutions, will continue in their struggle to survive, further exposing an already-vulnerable group of borrowers to even greater debt and associated worse health and wellbeing.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the critical need for inclusive risk governance to address systemic risks that extend beyond health crisis to encompass broader societal, economic, and political dimensions. This article examines the evolution of risk governance in the United Kingdom and South Korea, exploring the intersectionality between state capacity, risk governance, and critical human security. It investigates how different institutional and policy frameworks and political choices influence the evolution of risk governance in two countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. It found that both countries adaptively restructured their institutions and broadened the involvement of diverse stakeholders to address the systemic risk. However, significant challenges persisted in fully integrating diverse perspectives due to the limited capacity of coordination across different actors and scales of government within risk governance. This research calls for a rearticulation of risk governance frameworks that integrate human security and inclusive participation, particularly as risks become increasingly complex and intersect across multiple dimensions of daily life.

The underlying logics of how welfare states redistribute financial resources to their citizens have been studied intensively. Researchers have focussed on redistribution based on the principles of work, residency or taxpaying. However, family as a redistributive principle in its own right has never systematically been studied neither for a wide range of welfare regulations, nor for welfare benefits and obligations. Hence we do not know in how far the redistributive logics based on other redistributive principles are also found for the redistributive principle of the family. In this paper we address this question, using EUROMOD to analyse the degree of legally stipulated, family-related redistribution for forty-two hypothetical family forms. In our findings, all EU member-states show family-related redistribution in line with the ‘Robin Hood’ logic, with special redistribution to families with several children, single-earner families, and single parents.

Grandparent childcare is important to support parents’ work/care reconciliation. Research has begun to identify relationships between grandparent childcare patterns and policy settings. However, this work is disparate and focused on childcare policy, with little engagement with the broader range of policies that shape grandparent childcare. A holistic approach to understanding the relationship between policies and grandparent childcare is important to capture the intergenerational dynamics of family decisions about childcare and the complementarities (or not) of policies in different domains. This scoping review identifies policies that directly aim to shape grandparents’ involvement in childcare and that indirectly shape configurations of care. Most literature focuses on childcare and parental leave policies’ impact on parental demand for grandparent childcare. But a wider, intergenerational, policy lens reveals that policies (such as retirement income policies) affect parents’ demand for, and grandparents’ supply of childcare, and that policies in different domains are not always aligned.

Some leading UK politicians have claimed that a culture of welfare dependency exists and that a sizeable number of unemployed benefit claimants lack an appropriate commitment to employment. Such claims were used to justify the 2012 Welfare Reform Act’s new measures to steer unemployed claimants towards applying for and retaining jobs they might not want. The statistical analysis presented here is the first to explore possible connections between people’s attitudes towards disliked/unattractive jobs, their parents’ employment status, and the total time they have spent in unemployment. Logistic regression analysis used Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE)/Next Steps data on people born in 1989/90 to predict whether they spent an unusually long time unemployed between age eighteen and twenty-five; an attitude favouring joblessness over a disliked/unattractive job was a nonsignificant predictor in eleven of twelve multivariate models, and a weak predictor (OR = 1.32) in the other.

Dementia is represented as a condition deserving urgent policy attention. In the United Kingdom (UK) substantial resources have been invested in it, including in earlier intervention and in basic science. This selective narrative review explores England’s national dementia policy and practices. It uses Bacchi’s framework of questions, grounded in a Foucauldian understanding of governmentality, to understand how policy initiatives, service re-orientation and lobbying campaigns shape dementia as a problem. This ‘What is the Problem Represented to Be’ (WPR) analytic approach helps explain why prevention has often been overlooked and reminds us that not all ‘stakeholders’ have the same motivations. Our preliminary conclusions are that Bacchi’s approach does elucidate the representation of dementia and illuminates how a ‘medicalindustrial-charity-complex’ shapes the representation of dementia. Bacchi’s approach could be used to construct an agenda for change in dementia research and care.

The article investigates the role and challenges of digital technology adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic through a critical human security lens and comparative analysis between South Korea and the United Kingdom. The pandemic served as motivation for the adoption of digital technology among vulnerable groups, either forcing or encouraging the necessity and utilisation of these technologies. This contributes to enhancing human security, but the persistent exclusion of certain individuals indicates the need for additional attention and policies. The case of both countries highlights the disparities in technology use due to factors like digital literacy and information security concerns, emphasising that rapid technological adoption by governments does not guarantee an effective pandemic response. The study also examines the dual role of digital technologies in enhancing and compromising human security, illustrating the importance of a balanced approach to digitalisation that includes policy support for vulnerable groups and public endorsement of new technologies.

This research is focused on investigating the efficiency of Active Labor Market Policies (ALMP) expenditures of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries including institutional quality of governance. The emphasis is on the quality of governance that affects the supply and demand of employment and the ability of governments to master public spending. Using the general method of moments (GMM) for sixteen OECD countries over the 2005/2018 period, we show that Corruption Perception Index (CPI) reduced significantly the efficiency of ALMP on unemployment rate. This result is found consistent using another corruption proxy, Corruption Kaufmann Index (CKI). Moreover, our estimation suggest that the effectiveness of governance reinforces the effectiveness of ALMP.

This study explored the social policy context for international students in the UK and its implications for social exclusion (an inability to fully participate in society). Within a rapid review policy literature addressing international student experience, forty-two articles from the Web of Science and Social Science Research Network (SSRN) were selected through multiple screenings. Migration and education were the most explored policy areas, followed by inequalities, work, health and wellbeing, security, and housing. Results demonstrated that policy both creates barriers to inclusion (e.g. hostile environment migration/bordering practices) and supports inclusion/adaption to social exclusion-related challenges (e.g. sanctuary scholarships for forced migrants, Graduate visas). All international students to some degree lack equitable participation in wellbeing-relevant provision. Overall, policies are constructed so the state and universities can extract value from internationals without fully including them in British society. Policies abdicate responsibility for students’ inclusion, making it expensive and complicated to build a life there.

The global health crisis prompted Arabian Gulf states to implement extensive social protection measures to address public health and economic challenges. This study critically examines welfare reforms enacted by six Gulf countries – Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman – through the theoretical lenses of Welfare Regime Theory and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory. Initially, governments temporarily expanded exclusion-based welfare systems, primarily benefiting citizens, to support broader populations, including migrant workers. However, the long-term sustainability of these expansions remains uncertain. The findings suggest that although the crisis created a temporary policy window for welfare expansion, there was no fundamental reconfiguration of these exclusionary welfare regimes. This study enhances the understanding of the adaptability of Gulf welfare states during global crises and the potential for future policy shifts.

This article stresses the need for climate adaptation to better grasp the social dynamics of vulnerability to climate change. It argues that prevailing approaches in the UK have been inattentive to the social determinants of vulnerability for ethnic and racial minorities. The article begins by setting out the ways in which adaptation is understood and interpolated across multiple levels in the policy process, before discussing why prevailing approaches struggle to recognise that certain social dynamics render some populations more vulnerable to the ongoing effects of climate change. Following this, it will focus on domains of housing and health to reinscribe vulnerability in adaptation as a multidimensional concept, something that registers differentiated levels of structured adaptive capacity by focusing on racialised communities. It concludes by elaborating ways forward in climate adaptation planning and action.