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‘Active ageing’ has become a key phrase in discourses about challenges and remedies for demographic ageing and the enrolment of older adults into voluntary work is an important dimension of it. The pattern and factors conditioning volunteering among older people has so far been an under-researched topic in Europe and this is the first book to study volunteering among older people comparatively and comprehensively. In this topical book older people's volunteering is studied comparatively in eight European countries representing different kinds of welfare regimes, at the structural, macro, meso and micro levels. Overall it highlights how different interactions between the levels facilitate or hinder older people's inclusion in voluntary work and makes policy suggestions for an integrated strategy. This book provides important new insights for academics and students interested in ageing societies, active ageing and voluntary work. It will also be of great value for policy makers and practitioner in third sector, older volunteers and voluntary organisations.

This book is about the opportunities and challenges involved in mainstreaming knowledge about children in international-development policy and practice. It focuses on the ideas, networks, and institutions that shape the development of evidence about child poverty and well-being, and the use of such evidence in development-policy debates. The book also pays particular attention to the importance of power relations in influencing the extent to which children's voices are heard and acted upon by international-development actors. It weaves together theory, mixed-method approaches, and case studies spanning a number of policy sectors and diverse developing-country contexts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The book provides an introduction to debates on children, knowledge, and development, whilst at the same time offering new methodological and empirical insights.

Climate change is the main challenge facing developed countries in the 21st century. To what extent does this agenda converge with issues of poverty and social exclusion? Climate change and poverty offers a timely new perspective on the ‘ecosocial’ understanding of the causes and symptoms of, and solutions to, poverty and applies this to recent developments across a number of areas, including fuel poverty, food poverty, housing, transport and air pollution. Unlike any other publication, the book therefore establishes a new agenda for both environmental and social policies which has cross-national relevance. It will appeal to students in social policy, public policy, applied social studies and politics and will also be of interest to those studying international development, economics and geography

Participatory democracy has become an unshakable norm and widespread practice. Nowadays, public professionals and citizens regularly encounter each other in participatory practice to address shared problems. But while the frequency, pace, and diversity of their public encounters has increased, communicating productively in participatory practice remains a challenging, fragile, and demanding undertaking that often runs astray. This book explores how citizens and public professionals communicate, why this is so difficult, and what could lead to more productive conversations. This done by comparing cases of community participation in neighbourhood governance in three European countries (the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Italy). An emergent, grounded theory is presented based on interpretive research of the narratives citizens and public professionals tell about participatory practice. The theory of communicative capacity holds that citizens and public professionals tend to sustain habitual communicative patterns that limit their ability to cooperatively solve the problems they are facing together. Therefore, they need the ability to recognise and break through these habitual patterns by adapting the nature, tone, and conditions of conversations to the ‘law of the situation’. Exercising communicative capacity will enable public professionals and citizens to have more integrative encounters leading to shared understandings, joint activities, and cooperative relating. As such, the book presents policy makers, practitioners, students, and academics with a much needed evidence base for understanding and appreciating the often overlooked impact of communicative practices in participatory theory and practice.

This is one of the few books that explicitly focuses on the formulation, process and outcomes of prostitution policy. While the debate on prostitution focuses on broad regulatory regimes, the central premise of this book is that the outcomes of prostitution policy are in fact determined by local policy making. The book provides a detailed analysis of the challenges and pitfalls of designing and implementing prostitution policy in Austria and the Netherlands, with a focus on the major cities in these countries. The analysis shows that prostitution policy is challenged by the stigma attached to prostitution, the moral contestation around prostitution, the paradoxes of migration, as well as the inherent lack of data about prostitution. Locally we found that processes of regulatory drift and agency capture reversed originally progressive policy goals to result in a repressive form of regulation aimed at controlling and rolling back prostitution. These processes were strongly shaped by a dominant neo-abolitionist discourse that conflated prostitution with trafficking. Neo-abolitionist inspired regulation had the effect of ignoring the considerable labour exploitation in the domain of prostitution and contributed to the erosion of sex workers’ human rights. The authors propose to replace ‘fighting trafficking’ by ‘fighting exploitation’ to establish improved working conditions and labour rights for sex workers. Drawing on experiences from around the world, the authors argue for collaborative policymaking as a strategy for an effective and humane prostitution policy. That implies entering into a dialogue with, and the inclusion of, sex workers advocacy organizations in the formulation and implementation of prostitution policy.

This book is about being disabled and being poor, and the social, cultural, and political processes that link these two aspects of living. Environmental barriers, limited access to services, and discriminatory attitudes and practice are among key elements that drive disabled people into poverty and keep them there. The book explores the lived realities of people with disabilities from across the developing world and examines how the coping strategies of individuals and families emerge in different contexts.

This book presents a distinctive perspective on citizenship: treating it as a keyword and a focus of dispute in practice and in theory. The authors dispute the way citizenship is normally conceived and analysed within the social sciences, based on a view of citizenship as always emerging from struggle. This view is developed through an exploration of the entanglements of politics, culture and power that are both embodied and contested in forms of citizenship. This view of citizenship emerges from the international and interdisciplinary collaboration of the four authors, drawing on the diverse disputes over citizenship in their countries of origin (Brazil, France, Britain and the USA) and elsewhere, and moving beyond their disciplinary inheritances of anthropology, cultural studies, politics and social policy.

This book presents innovative international research into how the term “environment” is understood within families and how that plays out in everyday lives. Based on a study that involved creative qualitative work with families in India and the United Kingdom, the book shows how environmental practices are negotiated in families, and how they relate to values, identities, and society. Through that analysis, we begin to see the ways in which families and childhood are constructed as sites for intervention in debates about climate change. The book explores the situated, dynamic, and relational complexities, and of the ways in which space, place, and time intersect with meanings of environment in the everyday lives of children and families. It looks at the sort of environmental issues that families in India and the UK negotiate, and how children are often responsibilised in environmental policy and media discourses in both India and the UK.

This book explores the values of equality and diversity as promoted across liberal societies, drawing on various traditions of political and social philosophy, including liberal egalitarianism, existentialism and elements of post-modernism and post-structuralism. These philosophies are applied to policy and practice debates, especially concerning disability issues, but also relating to gender and multiculturalism.

This book is about the ways in which the governance of illicit drug use shapes female dependent drug users’ lives. It argues female drug users’ subjectivities, and hence their experiences, are shaped and regulated by drug policies. The relationship between the social regulation of female drug users and the “making up” of their identities is investigated. It explores the dominant governmental technologies of power from which the key constructions of women as “problematic” drug users emanate in the UK, Canada and the US: punishment and prohibition, medicalisation and welfarisation. It also investigates the meanings that women who identify as having dependent drug use attach to their drug use and themselves. Insights are gathered from the in-depth accounts of 40 female drug users in the UK. The book argues, in the regulation of illicit drug using women, particular subjectivities are constructed which, in themselves, become part of the narrative sustaining women in their problematic drug use. It asserts that female users experience drug policy as something that exacerbates their social and economic marginalisation and contributes to their lives being plunged into further marginalisation. At the same time, it analyses the contradictory choices, adaptations and resistances of female users. Although women users internalise many of the negative constructions of them found in policy discourse they also find ways to resist them. Popular misconceptions of female users which condition oppressive interventions are subverted with the hope of contributing to the formulation of drug policies based on empowerment, gender equity and social justice.

The turn towards a ‘Social Investment’ approach to welfare implies deploying resources to enhance human capital and mobilise the productive potential of citizens, starting in early childhood. Many influential academic and policy advocates present it as a new paradigm for the 21st Century. The book is structured in three parts around the social investment themes of: interventions in early life, labour market activation, and social solidarity. Empirical chapters offer original evidence from ten European countries: Italy, UK, Sweden, Finland,Greece, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Spain. Each of these chapters uncovers regional and local realities of social investment policies and services. Editorial chapters overview the conceptual landscape and synthesise key advances in thinking about the social investment 'paradigm', informed by original insight into what implementation of its principles can look like at street level.

Following on from International Approaches to Prostitution (The Policy Press, 2006), this book provides an overview of rape law and policy in ten countries, including England, Australia, Canada, India, and China. By introducing readers to national perspectives of issues relating to rape, the book presents a comparative approach that highlights the similarities and differences between countries, contexts, laws, key issues, policies, and interventions.

With an increasingly diverse ageing population, we need to expand our understanding of how social divisions intersect to affect outcomes in later life. This edited collection examines ageing, gender and sexualities from multidisciplinary and geographically diverse perspectives and looks at how these factors combine with other social divisions to affect experiences of ageing. It draws on theory and empirical data to provide both conceptual knowledge and clear ‘real-world’ illustrations, and includes section introductions to guide the reader through the debates and ideas.

This book takes the three founding principles of the French Revolution — liberty, equality, fraternity — and examines how they relate to social policy today. The book considers the political and moral dimensions of a wide range of social policies, and offers a different way of thinking about each subject from the way it is usually analysed. The discussion of theoretical issues is partly descriptive. The book explains a series of propositions about the core concepts, and tries to understand the positions that different writers adopt. Beyond description, however, the book is also prescriptive. There are several points in the argument where the book begins with a proposition and proceeds to defend it, rather than gradually working its way to a balanced conclusion. The book is in three main parts, one part devoted to liberty, equality and fraternity in turn. Each part explores the elements and dimensions of the key concept, its application to policy, its interrelationship with the other two principles, and how policies have developed to promote the principle in society. The conclusion outlines three models of radical politics, based on the main concepts.

This comprehensive collection discusses topical issues essential to both scholarship and policy making in the realm of Lifelong Learning policies and how far they succeed in supporting young people across their life courses, rather than one-sidedly fostering human capital for the economy. Examining specific regional and local contexts across Europe, all various in context, this book uses original research to evaluate differences in scope, approach, orientation, and objectives. It enquires into the embedding of LLL policies into the regional economy, the labour market, education and training systems and the individual life projects of young people, with focus on those in situations of near social exclusion.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. This book explores the critical role that local knowledge plays in public policy processes as well as its role in the co-production of policy relevant knowledge with the scientific and professional communities. The authors consider the mechanisms used by local organisations and the constraints and opportunities they face, exploring what the knowledge-to-policy process means, who is involved and how different communities can engage in the policy process. Ten diverse case studies are used from around Indonesia, addressing issues such as forest management, water resources, maritime resource management and financial services. By making extensive use of quotes from the field, the book allows the reader to ‘hear’ the perspectives and beliefs of community members around local knowledge and its effects on individual and community life.

In the mid-1970s, Latin America entered a period of profound social and economic crisis, marked by the rise of brutal military dictatorships across much of the region and the near-collapse of some of Latin America’s largest economies, in Mexico and Brazil. In response to this crisis, governments across the region adopted neoliberal structural adjustment programmes from the 1980s onwards, under the auspices of international organisations, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These reforms typically entailed sweeping cuts to public health and welfare programmes, the privatisation of large parts of the public infrastructure, the redistribution of wealth to economic elites, and a notable growth in poverty. As a result, these structural adjustment programmes faced growing resistance from the early 1990s onwards. Social and political movements, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, formulated powerful challenges to neoliberal orthodoxy, while the election to government of left-wing populist leaders such as Hugo Chávez (1998), Evo Morales (2005) or Rafael Correa (2006) opened the door to experiments with a range of anti-neoliberal political programmes. The failures of these programmes and ongoing conflicts between neoliberal and anti-neoliberal elites and social movements have by the mid-2010s resulted in growing social instability. This book examines cultural responses to this instability. It looks at a wide range of cultural forms, such as literature, underground cinema, street fairs and self-help books to explore how Latin Americans construct subjectivities, build communities and make meaning in their everyday lives in during a profound crisis of the social. In this context, the book emphasises the role which neoliberal and anti-neoliberal narratives of self and social relationships may come to play in popular culture and everyday lived experience in Latin America today.

What matters most in how poverty shapes children's wellbeing and development? How can data inform social policy and practice approaches to improving the outcomes for poorer children? Using life course analysis from the Young Lives study of 12,000 children growing up in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam over the past 15 years, this book draws on evidence from two cohorts of children, from 1 to 15 years old and from 8 to 22 years old. It examines how poverty affects children's development in low- and middle-income countries, and how policy has been used to improve their lives, then goes on to show when key developmental differences occur. The book uses new evidence to develop a framework of what matters most and when, and outlines effective policy approaches to inform the no-one left behind Sustainable Development Goal agenda.