The local and street-level production of social citizenship. The case of Dutch Social Assistance

Abstract

Much of the literature that analyses the impact of activation policies on the social citizenship of unemployed people focuses on the substantial aspects of these policies as these are regulated in national legislation. These analyses assume that national legislation provides us with sufficient insight into the nature and content of social policy programmes as these are actually delivered to unemployed people at the level of policy implementation. This would mean that the impact of activation policies on social citizenship is mainly ‘shaped’ by national policy programmes and their characteristics, and that the answers to questions concerning, for example, the profile of activation instruments or concerning the access to these instruments for specific groups of unemployed people can be found by studying these national policy programmes. The central argument developed in this chapter will be that this approach becomes increasingly problematic. Changes in national legislation concerning the substantial characteristics of social policies do not give us a complete picture of how welfare state reforms affect core dimensions of social citizenship and individual autonomy. The treatment of the target groups of social policy programmes, the nature of the support and services they receive, the accessibility of support and services — these and other aspects of social citizenship are not simply regulated in national programmes and subsequently implemented by administrative agencies. They are actively produced in increasingly complex governance and organizational contexts that involve a large variety of agencies and agents in policy making, policy delivery and service provision processes. Because of this, we argue that in investigating trends in social citizenship, a social policy perspective should be supplemented with a governance perspective as well as an organizational perspective.