Geography and social policy: spatial divisions of welfare

The case for a geography of welfare services cannot be made simply by reference to the observation that there are spatial disparities in life chances. One obvious reaction would be that a geographical perspective on this is no more than mapping the outcomes of social policy, and, looking at the British academic literature in that discipline, there is little evidence (at least from citations) that geographical work has had much of an impact. Reviewing work within political science, Pierson (1998) noted that the welfare state was no longer the preserve of sociologists, but did not evaluate the contribution of geographers. Indeed, if Powell and Boyne (2001) are to be believed, geography has had little of value to say about the welfare state. I agree with their point that there has never been an explicit spatial dimension – other than perhaps a vaguely specified notion of territorial justice – to welfare policies. However, they then advance a straw person argument. They are mistaken in suggesting that many geographical studies simply ‘point out that inequality exists’, use ‘simplistic notions of equality’ or assume that all geographical variations constitute defects. Admittedly, their review relies on some rather elderly geographical texts, mainly on the human geography of the UK, but I argue here that much has already been done to rectify the weaknesses they claim to discuss. Indeed they might usefully have consulted Pinch (1997; 1998) which emphasized the role of ‘geographical imaginations’ in understanding the diverse ‘worlds of welfare’ and which makes the case for a ‘spatially-aware social policy’. The aim of this review is to consider both the validity of the argument of Powell and Boyne (2001) and the extent to which Pinch’s challenges have been taken up. First, there is a review of literature on the impacts of globalization on welfare and the character of emergent transitions in the welfare state, raising questions about the character of supranational welfare ‘regimes’ and also about the diversity of political responses within Progress in Human Geography 27,3 (2003) pp. 363–374