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Participation, Responsibility and Choice: Summoning the Active Citizen in Western European Welfare States

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Abstract

Responsibility, participation and choice are key policy framings of active citizenship, summoning the citizen to take on new roles in welfare state reform. This volume traces the emergence of new discourses and the ways in which they take up and rework struggles of social movements for greater independence, power and control. It explores the changing cultural and political inflections of active citizenship in Germany, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, France, Italy and the UK, with ethnographic research complementing policy analysis. The editors then look across the volume to assess some of the tensions and contradictions arising in the turn to active citizenship. Two final chapters address the reworking of citizen/professional relationships and the remaking of public, private and personal responsibilities, with a particular focus on the contribution of feminist research and theory.
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... The participatory learning approach aims to create community bonds and social cohesion and to support intergenerational and intercultural citizenship (Cadei et al. eds 2016;Deluigi et al. eds 2015;Newman, Tonkens 2011). Learning together allows common horizons of reflection and action to be found and, in the case of home care, the elderly, families, carers and services can learn together which good practices work in order to highlight key steps and describe new models of intervention. ...
... From a perspective based on finding ways to avoid generating exclusion and privatization processes by socio-economic context (Skornia 2014), we will analyze in-depth a community learning process that affects the elderly and their families, the care-workers and the transnational dimension, the local contexts and socio-health services. The participatory learning approach aims to create community bonds and social cohesion and to support intergenerational and intercultural citizenship (Deluigi et al. eds 2015;Newman, Tonkens 2011). ...
... Do analizy wykorzystana jest perspektywa włączania, polegająca na unikaniu procesów wykluczenia i prywatyzacji (Skornia 2014). Uczenie się ma na celu tworzenie więzi społecznych i wzmocnienie spójności już istniejących oraz wspieranie międzypokoleniowego i międzykulturowego obywatelstwa (Deluigi et al. eds 2015;Newman, Tonkens 2011). ...
... An ideological shift towards the neoliberal end of the political spectrum has provided governments with new ways to take control of these costs. Such an ideological shift has been referred to as a shift from the welfare state to the "participatory society", as it is termed in the Netherlands [6]. The former is primarily based on principles of solidarity and a strong government that organizes education, healthcare, housing, poverty relief and social insurance for all citizens as they go through different stages of life [7]. ...
... The former is primarily based on principles of solidarity and a strong government that organizes education, healthcare, housing, poverty relief and social insurance for all citizens as they go through different stages of life [7]. By contrast, the latter emphasizes individual responsibility, a considerable degree of choice in the market for public services, and 'participation' in the provision of public services, often accompanied by a withdrawal of the state as a provider of these services [6]. ...
Article
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Background Despite the great confidence of Western governments in the principles of New Public Management (NPM) and its ability to stimulate “healthcare entrepreneurship”, it is unclear how policies seeking to reform healthcare services provoke such entrepreneurship in individual institutions providing long-term healthcare. This study examines such situated responses in a Dutch nursing home for elderly people suffering from dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease. Methods A four-year inductive longitudinal single-case study has been conducted. During this time period, the Dutch government imposed various NPM-based healthcare reforms and this study examines how local responses unfolded in the nursing home. Through interviews conducted with managers, administrators and supporting staff, as well as the examination of a large volume of government instructions and internal documents, the paper documents how these reforms resulted in several types of entrepreneurship, which were not all conducive to the healthcare innovations the government aspired to have. Results The study records three subsequent strategies deployed at the local level: elimination of healthcare services; non-healthcare related collaboration with neighboring institutions; and specialization in specific healthcare niches. These strategies were brought about by specific types of entrepreneurship – two of which were oriented towards the administrative organization rather than healthcare innovations. The study discusses the implications of having multiple variations of entrepreneurship at the local level. Conclusion Governmental policies for healthcare reforms may be more effective, if policymakers change output-based funding systems in recognition of the limited control by providers of long-term healthcare over the progression of clients' mental disease and ultimate passing.
... In particular, in contrast with the dominant focus in the governance literature on empowerment, participation and collaboration (cf. Sørensen & Torfing, 2003), responsibilisation or incorporation appear as warranted critical concepts (Cruickshank, 1990;Newman & Tonkens, 2011). ...
Thesis
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The interplay of practices of environmental governance and interactive/deliberative governance forms a rising phenomenon within Public Administration. This thesis researches this interplay by focusing on the case of the Rotterdam Climate Accord. Utilising a discourse analysis methodology I explored how both environmental governance and interactive/deliberative governance discourses reciprocally legitimate each other in governance arrangements addressing climate change. Incorporating a highly warranted elaboration of the dimension of power in PA and governance, by departing from the relationship between citizens and government this thesis explicates the dynamics of power beyond the state as it takes shape in the guise of environmental or climate governance. As such this research assumes a more critical approach to phenomena of governance, yet by relying upon theoretical criteria derived from deliberative democracy provides constructive findings for the future study of governance as a performative, deliberative democratic phenomenon.
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Chapter
This chapter introduces the concept of ailment, which is about generalised care needs, including the need for self-care. Ailment does not indicate an immediate dependency on others. Rather, it is a human condition and force that mobilises emotions, actions and relations. Responses to ailment extend from concrete encounters between human beings in the immediate environment to political and institutional responses in societies across the world. The political relatedness that ailment enacts in the world and the different kinds of social orders that emerge through different personal and collective responses to the needs of ailing subjects are discussed.
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As participatory integration policies proliferate in Europe, it has become urgent to examine how the relational techniques of government they deploy condition migrants' membership in their host societies. This article forges an interactive and intersectional approach to the analysis of integration policies with the intent of laying bare the complex dynamics of belonging and exclusion played out in their context. Based on an ethnographic study in Helsinki, the article shows how the intendedly inclusive and egalitarian 'homey' mode of belonging promoted by welfare professionals engenders uneven conditions for immigrant women to partake in the local community and broader Finnish society. Premised on gendered, culturalized, and classed categories of citizenship and belonging the neighbourhood house provides positive recognition to 'respectable' (immigrant) mothers but also perpetuates the division between natives and immigrants and requires more belonging work from them than their native peers.
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