Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2001, Pages 427-460
Political Geography

Exporting workfare/importing welfare-to-work: exploring the politics of Third Way policy transfer

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0962-6298(00)00069-XGet rights and content

Abstract

The paper presents a critical analysis of ‘policy transfers’ in the field of welfare-to-work or ‘workfare’ programming, focusing on recent experiences in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the 1990s, work-based welfare reform has been established as a policy orthodoxy, a social-policy counterpart to ‘flexible’ modes of labour-market governance. Increasingly, this is celebrated as a paradigmatic example of ‘Third Way’ policy-making. While it has become something of a cliché that British welfare policy has been ‘Americanised’ in recent years, detailed analysis of the policy formation and development process around the Labour Government's New Deal programme for the young unemployed reveals that this has indeed been a sphere of intensive and multi-lateral policy transfers. Categorically, this does not mean that some simple process of policy ‘convergence’ is underway, as the form and function of such policies is prone to change as they are translated and re-embedded within and between different institutional, economic and political contexts (at the local and national scales). Rather paradoxically, while the turnover of the policy-making cycle seems to be accelerating in the field of welfare-to-work — as implementation schedules are intensified, as ‘reform’ becomes a systemic condition, and as extra-local policy learning and emulation is normalised — the effectiveness of policies and programmes remains stubbornly dependent on local economic and institutional conditions — as ‘successful’ programmes remain very difficult to replicate in other locations, as tendentially-decentralising policy regimes exhibit growing spatial unevenness, and as local labour market conditions continue to exert an inordinate influence on programme outcomes. Policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly pinning their hopes on decentralised modes of policy delivery as a means of animating (supposedly latent) innovatory capacity at the local level, despite the growing evidence that sustainable solutions to the problems of unemployment and poverty lie outside the neoliberal policy agenda of market-orientated workfare.

Section snippets

Third way policy transfer and the workfare state

An explanation of the continuing salience of the American reform model must delve beneath the typical concerns of the policy transfer literature, in which tried-and-tested policy ideas are taken up by those in the market for new approaches. Certainly, as King, 1995, King & Wickham-Jones, 1999 and David Dolowitz (1998) have conclusively demonstrated, there is a long history of US–UK transfers of policies, terminology, and administrative routines in the field of welfare-to-work, for all the

Welfare reform, off-the-peg

For all the exaggerated claims that are made on behalf of the US model, an inescapable fact is that the current salience of its welfare-to-work ‘message’ is strongly predicated on the coincidence of falling welfare rolls across the US. These economically contingent conditions have bestowed on the US model a fleeting authority within overseas policy communities that the more sober results of countless evaluation studies suggest it does not deserve (see Blank, 1997, Handler & Hasenfeld, 1997).

Third Way welfare reform?

According to John Kay (1998: 35), “Welfare-to-work … represents the largest ideological shift by New Labour and most clearly epitomises the Third Way”. However, perhaps the most searching question is how far this differs from the American Way, appropriately repackaged for British consumption. New Labour's reform rhetoric certainly exhibits a strong American accent, even if some of the more contentious terminology is given a European inflection: Blair speaks of the ‘workless class’ rather than

Welfare-to-work policy-making, UK-style

During the period of Conservative government, Labour's social policy stance was based on sustained opposition to Conservative benefit reforms (particularly compulsory work schemes such as Project Work and Jobseeker's Allowance, JSA), combined with the search for innovative social policy-making in northern Europe, Australia, and North America (see Finn, 1987, Walker, 1991, Commission on Social Justice, 1994, King, 1995, Deacon, 1997, Dolowitz, 1998, Jones, 1999). On entering government,

Conclusion: which Third Way?

The parallel welfare-to-work strategies set in train by the Blair and Clinton governments give concrete expression to recent claims that a Third Way policy orthodoxy is under construction. Yet at the same time, this critical field of reform exposes many of the limitations and contradictions of such active forms of social interventionism when operated in the context of a neoliberal economic policy framework. New Labour's welfare-to-work project is being developed in the context of a

Acknowledgements

Nik Theodore acknowledges the support provided by the Atlantic Fellowships programme and Jamie Peck that of the Leverhulme Trust (Research Fellowship 10896) and ESRC (grant number R 000222543). This paper has benefited from discussions with Neil Brenner, Alan Deacon, Dean Herd, Ruth Lister, Lawrence Mead, Frances Fox Piven, William Plowden, and Robert Walker. All the usual disclaimers apply.

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