Disability

Disability presents a key challenge for modern welfare states. It has been a core policy concern throughout their evolution, but the concept of disability, and what it means for public policy, has changed radically in the past half-century. Disability is now widely understood, from a social model perspective, as an issue of social inclusion and social justice. It is also framed by increasingly coherent international human rights frameworks. The chapter reviews changing ideas about disability, and changing policy responses to it, from the early origins of the welfare state to the contemporary global governance of human rights. It examines approaches to disability policy in terms of cash and in-kind entitlements, employment-focused policies, and broader rights-based approaches. Disability is a flexible administrative category that has been deployed selectively to control of labour supply and welfare entitlement. Reframing national disability policies within a global discourse of social rights has been an important development, but rights-based legislation alone is unlikely to resolve its structural basis in capitalist markets and there is still little evidence of marked improvement in aggregate social outcomes for disabled people.