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Drawing from the fields of Cultural Political Economy and Critical Policy Studies, this article examines the relationship between social policy and neoliberalism, focusing on the ‘social investment’ discourse promoted by the European Commission. In the social policy literature, social investment is widely considered a policy framework able to overcome neoliberalism, with the latter defined rather narrowly as welfare retrenchment. Instead, referring to the vast literature on neoliberalism, this article proposes an innovative two-dimensional conceptualisation of neoliberalism as a political and epistemological project. The analysis reveals that while social investment provides a much more generous reform path than welfare retrenchment, it nevertheless largely follows neoliberalism in its epistemological and distributive dimensions, extending the economic rationale to non-economic areas and accommodating the interests of the economic and financial elites. The article finally connects this result with broader debates within international political economy on the future of the welfare state in a global economy.

Studying the relationship between social policy promotion and neoliberalism: the case of social investment