{"title":"Social policy responses to COVID-19: New issues, old solutions?","authors":"Sarah Cook, Marianne S. Ulriksen","doi":"10.1177/14680181211055645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14680181211055645","url":null,"abstract":"Analysing a pandemic quintessentially requires a global lens. With COVID-19, a global public health crisis has been coupled with devastating economic and social impacts – what some are calling a ‘syndemic’ (GSP Digest, 2021; Schmidt-Sane et al., 2021), none of which can be addressed solely within national borders. International organisations (IOs) and other institutions of global governance inevitably play a critical role – in defining and measuring the problem, sharing information and technical capacities, making policy recommendations, guiding and advising national governments, and where necessary holding governments and other actors to account. National governments across the world have reacted in varying ways to the pandemic, considering both recommendations and lessons learned from previous crises and across different contexts, as well as by assessing their own conditions. Local and national responses and actions in turn shape regional and global knowledge and policy, including through various channels of engagement with international organisations. The contributions in this special issue highlight some of these dynamics between the national, regional and global levels. The articles provide new empirical analyses, drawn from particular national (sometimes regional) contexts, and address or compare national level policies and responses and their impacts on particular groups; several explicitly examine whether and how regional, international or transnational actors and policies shape responses to the pandemic at different scales. The discussion in this Introduction is structured along the following two main axes: first, we examine new or previously neglected issues that have been made visible or attracted significant policy or public attention during the pandemic, particularly as they 1055645 GSP0010.1177/14680181211055645Global Social PolicySpecial Issue Introduction research-article2021","PeriodicalId":46041,"journal":{"name":"Global Social Policy","volume":"21 1","pages":"381 - 395"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43128167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Global Social PolicyPub Date : 2021-12-01Epub Date: 2021-04-09DOI: 10.1177/14680181211008340
Michael Leiblfinger, Veronika Prieler, Mădălina Rogoz, Martina Sekulová
{"title":"Confronted with COVID-19: Migrant live-in care during the pandemic.","authors":"Michael Leiblfinger, Veronika Prieler, Mădălina Rogoz, Martina Sekulová","doi":"10.1177/14680181211008340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14680181211008340","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the spring 2020, measures introduced across Europe to limit the spread of COVID-19 included, among others, the temporary closure of borders. For Romanian and Slovakian live-in carers, this meant they were no longer able to commute between the Austrian households they work in and their respective countries of origin. Due to the relatively short cyclical rotas of 2-4 weeks, travel restrictions heavily affected cross-border live-in care between the three countries, which makes them a particular case for studying the effects of pandemic-related measures on transnational care arrangements. Drawing on media reports, relevant laws and policies, and interviews with representatives of care workers' interests, the article examines how live-in care as a whole and care workers in particular were affected by the pandemic and related policy responses such as specific travel arrangements and financial incentives for workers. It shows that while live-in carers were deemed critical workers and essential for the long-term care system, the inequalities and dependencies already existing in transnational care arrangements were deepened. Care workers' wants, needs and interests were subordinated to the interests of care recipients, agencies and sending and receiving countries.</p>","PeriodicalId":46041,"journal":{"name":"Global Social Policy","volume":"21 3","pages":"490-507"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14680181211008340","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39719238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When a crisis undermines quality public service provision: Romanian early childhood education and care through the SARS-Cov-2 epidemic","authors":"Borbála Kovács","doi":"10.1177/14680181211011369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14680181211011369","url":null,"abstract":"What appeared to be the success of many Eastern European states in managing the toll of the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic in its first round has been attributed to the early introduction of strict lockdown. However, erring on the side of caution came at a high price, with mixed economies of welfare shifting sometimes radically towards families, with the related costs unevenly distributed. Using the case of early childhood education and care (ECEC), the article explores the specifics of what has been a more general pattern in epidemic-induced social policy adaptation in the Romanian context: the overnight, radical and prolonged individualisation of service provision without the corresponding remaking of the cash nexus. It expands on the timeline of government decisions on family policy adaptations, including ECEC service provision. The article also reviews fragmented evidence about the impact of ECEC service suspension on the mixed economy of early years care. The article explains how and why the Romanian government was able to effectively suspend ECEC service delivery between March and September 2020 while keeping related financial arrangements practically unaltered, and do so without open protest. The Romanian case reveals how and why a family policy environment historically characterised by fragmented, selective and partially adequate provision, directly and indirectly maintaining the familialisation of young children’s care, acts as a catalyst for more of the same in hard times: fragmented, selective and only partially adequate intervention. In conceptual terms, the article suggests that familialist family policy is particularly sticky, more so in times of crisis than in ‘good’ times.","PeriodicalId":46041,"journal":{"name":"Global Social Policy","volume":"21 1","pages":"508 - 528"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43650165","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unemployment insurance in the Global South since 1950: Drivers of policy adoption","authors":"Herbert Obinger, Carina Schmitt","doi":"10.1177/14680181211049654","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14680181211049654","url":null,"abstract":"Until 1945, Western countries were the only ones to have introduced unemployment insurance programs. Since their adoption was extremely controversial, almost all Western nations introduced income support for the unemployed only in the wake of national emergencies such as war and economic depression. This article examines the determinants of program adoption in the Global South, which commenced after the Second World War. With the exception of military conflict, we find that the introduction of unemployment insurance was shaped by factors deviating from the driving forces of program adoption in the Western world. More specifically, we provide evidence that international factors such as war, the activities of the ILO and policy diffusion were more important than domestic factors.","PeriodicalId":46041,"journal":{"name":"Global Social Policy","volume":"22 1","pages":"67 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47103396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social resilience and welfare systems under COVID-19: A European comparative perspective","authors":"J. Pereirinha, Elvira Pereira","doi":"10.1177/14680181211012946","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14680181211012946","url":null,"abstract":"COVID-19 and the corresponding economic lockdown and income loss for large segments of population was something unexpected for all European countries, and their welfare systems were not prepared to protect their citizens from such threats. Social resilience is becoming used in disaster risk analysis, and preferred to that of vulnerability, to refer the ability of the social entities to respond to such challenges, enabling them to cope and adjust to adverse events. It has been more recently used in the context of the European Union (EU) about COVID-19, regarding the creation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility, intended to mitigate the economic and social impact of the coronavirus pandemic. The global nature of this pandemic makes possible and relevant a deeper understanding of social resilience at different levels of analysis: international, national, local and individual/household levels. This article aims to contribute to this by proposing a set of indicators of social resilience in face of COVID-19, supported in a theoretical framework developed herein, and comparing the performance of a selection of EU countries with distinct welfare system configurations, with different roles played by the government, the market, the social organizations and the families. Using comparable statistical data at macro level and data concerning the responses of government to the economic and social effects of the pandemic, we produce a synthetic index of social resilience, combining resilience on coping and resilience on adapting. We relate the differences found in coping and adapting with the welfare system configurations of these countries.","PeriodicalId":46041,"journal":{"name":"Global Social Policy","volume":"21 1","pages":"569 - 594"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43222405","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Global eco-social policy: Contestation within an emerging policy era?","authors":"A. Kaasch, Robin Schulze Waltrup","doi":"10.1177/14680181211019152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14680181211019152","url":null,"abstract":"Currently, we see in many ways how environmental and social problems and related demands for political responses are increasingly difficult to separate from one another. What used to be completely different policy fields are now merging. Not only do climate change and pollution have severe implications for the living conditions of people all over the globe, but political measures addressing environmental problems may have a tremendous social impact as well. This presents challenges to existing social policy arrangements and will require the development and adjustment of social policies to protect existing vulnerable groups. Furthermore, it will be necessary to ensure that new policies do not exacerbate pre-existing inequities. Examples include the impact of extreme weather events on already vulnerable parts of populations, and the potentially regressive impact of taxes introduced for protecting the environment. Be it out of a more extended and increasing awareness of the threat of climate change in a development context, the reflections on the appropriate path of recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic or any of the many other connections between environmental changes and global social problems and needs, making the link between environmental and social policies is increasingly gaining momentum at national and transnational policy levels. The key challenge is how to combine ideas of growth, demands of a possible universal social protection and environmentally sustainable human living. Despite obvious connections, the transnational governance of environmental and social policies has, so far, primarily been studied and discussed within the two separate fields. While necessary, combining them presents complications. On the one hand, the two policy fields share the aim of absorbing and compensating for externalized economic and market failures. Social policies act as safety nets with measures such as collective protection schemes and re-distributional mechanisms. Environmental policies serve the protection of the environment, for example, by preventing overexploitation. Furthermore, both fields may play a regulatory role and adjust incomes or property rights","PeriodicalId":46041,"journal":{"name":"Global Social Policy","volume":"21 1","pages":"319 - 322"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14680181211019152","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41622204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Margaret Babirye, J. Berten, Fabian Besche-Truthe, A. Boyashov, Cailin Crockett, Sara Cufré, Eberechukwu Igbojekwe, A. Kaasch, Meghan C. Laws, Tahnee Ooms, Robin Schulze
{"title":"Global Social Policy Digest 21.2: Turning the tide in the battle against COVID-19?","authors":"Margaret Babirye, J. Berten, Fabian Besche-Truthe, A. Boyashov, Cailin Crockett, Sara Cufré, Eberechukwu Igbojekwe, A. Kaasch, Meghan C. Laws, Tahnee Ooms, Robin Schulze","doi":"10.1177/14680181211008665","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14680181211008665","url":null,"abstract":"The Global Social Policy (GSP) Digest was produced under the editorship of Amanda Shriwise with support from Bielefeld University and the University of Bremen. It has been compiled by Margaret Babirye, John Berten, Fabian Besche-Truthe, Anatoly Boyashov, Cailin Crockett, Sara Cufré, Eberechukwu Igbojekwe, Alexandra Kaasch, Meghan Laws, Tahnee Ooms, Robin Schulze Waltrup, and Amanda Shriwise. All websites referenced were accessible in March 2021. This edition of the Digest covers the period from October 2020 to January 2021.","PeriodicalId":46041,"journal":{"name":"Global Social Policy","volume":"21 1","pages":"349 - 377"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14680181211008665","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49417507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Uncovering different degrees of eco-social policy","authors":"Dunja Krause","doi":"10.1177/14680181211019165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14680181211019165","url":null,"abstract":"For many years, calls for sustainability and climate action have been growing louder and a lot of progress has been made in bringing eco-social concerns onto the international policy agenda. While the field of explicit eco-social policy work and research is still comparatively small, the growing importance of addressing the interlinkages and intersections of environmental and social policy has been recognized by a range of different stakeholders both within and beyond the political mainstream. Reconciling environmental and social concerns is not an easy task as prosperity and well-being are often seen as a function of economic growth, whereas environmental sustainability is inherently incompatible with unlimited economic growth (see Büchs in this Forum). As a result, the field of eco-social policy (ESP) is broad and encompasses a range of different approaches and initiatives that can vary quite significantly in terms of their underlying worldviews, main objectives and ambition for change. ESP can be the adjustment of traditional social policies to include environmental considerations, for example, through adaptive social protection systems that aim to reduce vulnerability to climate extremes or public work programmes offering employment in conservation and sustainable land management. Similarly, environmental policies can be expanded to incorporate social dimensions in order to become ESP, for example, when savings from fossil fuel subsidy removal are redistributed to alleviate the burden fuel price increases have on poor households. The perhaps biggest potential of eco-social policy lies in truly integrated approaches that combine ambitious environmental objectives with progressive social objectives from the start in order to promote policy that can set boundaries for economic choices based on their sustainability impacts (see Cook and Dugarova, 2014; United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), 2016). It is important to acknowledge the variation that exists within the field of ESP in order to understand different assumptions and objectives underpinning markedly different pathways to sustainability. Utting (2013) distinguishes market liberalism, embedded liberalism and alter-globalization as three ideal-typical approaches to sustainability that differ both in terms of problem identified and solutions proposed. For both market liberalism and embedded","PeriodicalId":46041,"journal":{"name":"Global Social Policy","volume":"21 1","pages":"332 - 334"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14680181211019165","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48561138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The making of a global medical tourism destination: From state-supported privatisation to state entrepreneurialism in healthcare in Turkey","authors":"V. Yilmaz, Puren Aktas","doi":"10.1177/1468018120981423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1468018120981423","url":null,"abstract":"Examining medical tourism, especially in countries with publicly funded and organised healthcare systems, offers a gateway into an understanding of the changing role of the state in contemporary societies. Drawing on a comprehensive documentary review, this article examines the evolving role of the state in transforming Turkey into a global medical tourism destination. The article identifies two stages of state involvement in medical tourism: the period after the 2003 healthcare reform and the rise of an entrepreneurial healthcare state since 2013. The article suggests that the state, in the first period, performed a facilitator role by supporting privatisation in healthcare provision; in the second period, it assumed an entrepreneurial role, establishing large hospital complexes through a public-private partnership and created a public corporation to capitalise on the export of healthcare services. The Turkish case demonstrates that the role of the state in medical tourism is subject to change over time, depending on shifts in governmental strategies for healthcare and government-business relations. The article also offers evidence on the continued relevance of the multidimensional engagement of the state in healthcare that cuts across economic and social policy commitments. This engagement has recently extended into the domain of healthcare provision in the context of medical tourism.","PeriodicalId":46041,"journal":{"name":"Global Social Policy","volume":"21 1","pages":"301 - 318"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1468018120981423","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44726432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}