scholarly journals A Great Desire for Children: The Beginning of Transnational Adoption in Denmark and Norway during the 1960’s

Genealogy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 104
Author(s):  
Kasper Emil Rosbjørn Eriksen
Keyword(s):  
International Adoption ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Transnational Adoption ◽  
Desire For Children ◽  
Child Placement ◽  
Welfare Systems ◽  
Private Actors ◽  
The Welfare State

This article examines the beginning of transnational adoption in Denmark and Norway to illuminate the role of private actors and associations in Scandinavian welfare systems. Utilizing case studies of two prominent private adoption actors, Tytte Botfeldt and Torbjørn Jelstad, the article analyzes how these Nordic welfare states responded to the emergence of transnational adoption in comparison with both each other, neighboring Sweden, and the United States. This study shows that private actors and associations strongly influenced the nascent international adoption systems in these countries, by effectively promoting transnational adoption as a progressive and humanitarian form of global parenthood; while simultaneously emphasizing the responsibility of the welfare state to accommodate and alleviate childless couples’ human rights and need for children. A need that was strong enough that couples were willing to transcend legal, national, and racial borders. Ultimately, Danish and Norwegian authorities not only had to show leniency towards flagrant violations of adoption and child placement rules, but also change these so that families could fulfill their great need for children by legally adopting them from abroad.

scholarly journals Software-Sorted Exclusion of Asylum Seekers in Norway and Finland

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Funda Ustek-Spilda ◽  
Marja Alastalo
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
Welfare Systems ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Welfare State

As James Scott writes, to be able to govern, administrative bodies need to make objects of government legible. Yet migrant persons do not fall neatly into the categories of administrative agencies. This categorical ambiguity is illustrated in the tendency to exclude asylum seekers from various population registers and to not provide them with ID numbers, which constitute the backbone of many welfare states in Europe. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Norway and Finland, and in Eurostat and UNECE, we study how practices of population registration and statistics compilation on foreign-born persons can be beset by differential and at times contradictory outlooks. We show that these outlooks are often presented in the form of seemingly apolitical software infrastructures or decisions made in response to software with limited, if any, discretion available to bureaucrats, statisticians, and policymakers. Our two cases, Norway and Finland, are considered social-democratic regimes within Esping-Andersen’s famous global social policy typology. Using science and technology studies and specifically “double social life of methods,” we seek to trace how software emerges as both a device for administrative bookkeeping and also for enacting the “migrant” categories with particular implications for how the welfare state comes to be established and how welfare policies come to be implemented. We note that even if all statistical production necessarily involves inclusions and exclusions, how the “boundaries” are set for whom to include and exclude directly affects the lives of those implicated by these decisions, and as such, they are onto-political. This means that welfare policies get made at the point of sorting, categorizing, and ordering of data, even before it is fed into software and other administrative devices of government. In view of this, we show that methods enact their subjects—we detail how the methods set to identify and measure refugee statistics in Europe end up enacting the welfare services they have access to. We argue that with increasing automation and datafication, the scope of welfare systems is being curtailed under the label of efficiency, and individual contexts are ignored.

From Welfare States to Planetary Well-Being

2021 ◽  
pp. 900-920
Author(s):  
Ian Gough
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Social ◽  
Welfare Systems ◽  
Basic Services ◽  
Rich Countries ◽  
The Welfare State

This final chapter concentrates on global environmental challenges to rich-country welfare states: climate breakdown and associated ecological disasters. These common threats add two new raison d’êtres for welfare states: first, that the security and equity they seek should be sustainable through time; second, that their scope is broadened to take account of global equity and well-being. With a few notable exceptions, these fundamental questions have been ignored in the social policy community. I argue here that we need to transform our understanding of social policy in four ways, each more difficult than the previous one. First, we need to develop novel eco-social programmes to tap synergies between well-being and sustainability via transformative investment programmes such as a Green New Deal. Second, we need to recompose consumption in rich countries in two ways: to realize the best principles of the welfare state by extending the range of universal basic services and to work towards a private ‘consumption corridor’ to end waste, meet basic needs, and reduce inequality. Third, we must develop strategies of ‘reduce and redistribute’ to adapt welfare systems for a future of slower, if not negative, economic growth. And finally, we need to develop a global equity framework to meet climatic and ecological threats in a globally just way that recognizes current international inequalities.

scholarly journals OLD AND FORGOTTEN? CARE FOR ELDERS IN MEXICO AND THE U.S.

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S64-S65
Author(s):  
Emma Aguila ◽  
Jaqueline L Angel ◽  
Kyriakos Markides
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Health Care Financing ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
The Government ◽  
The U.S

Abstract The United States and Mexico differ greatly in the organization and financing of their old-age welfare states. They also differ politically and organizationally in government response at all levels to the needs of low-income and frail citizens. While both countries are aging rapidly, Mexico faces more serious challenges in old-age support that arise from a less developed old-age welfare state and economy. For Mexico, financial support and medical care for older low-income citizens are universal rights, however, limited fiscal resources for a large low-income population create inevitable competition among the old and the young alike. Although the United States has a more developed economy and well-developed Social Security and health care financing systems for the elderly, older Mexican-origin individuals in the U.S. do not necessarily benefit fully from these programs. These institutional and financial problems to aging are compounded in both countries by longer life spans, smaller families, as well as changing gender roles and cultural norms. In this interdisciplinary panel, the authors of five papers deal with the following topics: (1) an analysis of old age health and dependency conditions, the supply of aging and disability services, and related norms and policies, including the role of the government and the private sector; (2) a binational comparison of federal safety net programs for low-income elderly in U.S. and Mexico; (3) when strangers become family: the role of civil society in addressing the needs of aging populations; and (4) unmet needs for dementia care for Latinos in the Hispanic-EPESE.

The Politics of the Welfare State: Canada, Sweden, and the United States

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 748-750
Author(s):  
Linda A. White
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Social Indicators ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Global Integration ◽  
Standards Of Living ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Welfare State

The Politics of the Welfare State: Canada, Sweden, and the United States, Gregg M. Olsen, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. vi, 258This book presents a familiar puzzle in comparative politics: how are we to understand variation in the design and scope of social programs and substantive outcomes for citizens in the three welfare states under scrutiny. As Olsen argues, all three cases are “advanced, industrialized, and highly affluent capitalist nations…. and all three nations enjoy average per capita incomes and standards of living that are among the highest in the world” (10). Yet we find great variation on a number of social indicators such as poverty levels, and income and wealth disparities. All three have also “experienced marked increases in inequality and welfare state retrenchment in recent years” (11) but yet “they continue to differ along these dimensions, even in the face of similar domestic strains and other exogenous pressures related to global integration” (11). The question is how do we account for the variation in the use of social policy to assuage inequalities and respond to these exogenous pressures.

Ideas, Institutions and the Policies of Governments: a Comparative Analysis: Part III

1973 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 409-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony King
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Public Services ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
The Common

III THE PATTERN EXPLAINED In part I of this paper we described the gross pattern of public policy in our five countries. In part II we looked at how the pattern developed in each of the countries. We noticed that the countries have pursued policies that diverge widely, at least with respect to the size of the direct operating role of the State in the provision of public services. We also noticed that the United States differs from the four other countries far more than they do from each other. These findings will not have come as a great surprise to anybody, although some readers may have been surprised – in view of the common assumption that all major western countries are ‘welfare states’ – to discover just how much the countries differ and what different histories they have had.

Inequality and the Carceral State

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Gottschalk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Institutionalism ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
Penal Policy ◽  
Cross National ◽  
The Welfare State

Some of the most promising work on mass incarceration, the retributive turn in penal policy, and growing inequalities in the United States employs a historical institutional lens. This work has illuminated the origins of the carceral state and the possibilities for dismantling it, the sources of interstate and cross-national variations in penal policy, and the role of race, gender, and the transformation of the welfare state in the construction of the carceral state. Going forward, illumination of pressing political problems like the carceral state will require that historical institutionalism retain or resurrect some of the qualities that originally made it so distinctive—even if that cuts against the grain of the wider discipline of political science.

How Does Decentralisation Affect the Welfare State? Territorial Politics and the Welfare State in the UK and US

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
SCOTT L. GREER
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Intergovernmental Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Central State ◽  
Veto Points ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractThe relationship between political decentralisation and the welfare state is much studied, and large-scale studies have repeatedly found that decentralised states have less generous welfare states. How do we fit that with other studies that emphasise the potential of decentralisation to raise welfare standards? This article argues that decentralisation, as a variable, is too broad and it is more efficient to focus on the structure of veto players in the central state, intergovernmental relations and intergovernmental finance. Those are the actual mechanisms that connect decentralisation to the welfare states, and they can all vary independently of decentralisation. It uses recent changes in the United States and United Kingdom as examples. The fragmentation and average weakness of the US welfare state is mostly due to a federal government riddled with internal veto points that permits considerable interstate variation and low overall average provision, while tight central control on finances in the UK means that most variation is in the organisation, rather than levels, of social services.

Public Health and the Law

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 690-695 ◽  
Author(s):  
James G. Hodge ◽  
Lexi C. White ◽  
Andrew Sniegowski
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Health Measures ◽  
Public Health Officials ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Structural Principles ◽  
Laws And Policies ◽  
Private Actors

Promoting and protecting the public's health in the United States and abroad are intricately tied to laws and policies. Laws provide support for public health measures, authorize specific actions among public and private actors, and empower public health officials. Laws can also inhibit or restrict efforts designed to improve communal health through protections for individual rights or structural principles of government. Advancing the health of populations through law is complex and subject to constant tradeoffs. This column seeks to explore the role of law in the interests of public health through scholarly and applied assessments across a spectrum of key issues. The first of these assessments focuses on a critical topic in emergency legal preparedness.

Changing Expectations? The Change in the Role of the Welfare Ministry in the Regulation of Personal Social Services

2020 ◽  
Vol 691 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-173
Author(s):  
Lihi Lahat
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Regulatory Role ◽  
Role Of Government ◽  
Historical Changes ◽  
The Welfare State

Many welfare states have increased their regulatory role, but little attention has been given to historical changes in the regulatory role of government ministries. This study embraces a mezzo perspective and explores the regulatory role of the Welfare Ministry of Israel in the field of personal social services, asking the following questions: 1) What are the changes in regulatory expectations versus practices over the last five decades? and 2) How can we explain these changes and their outcomes? The study is based on the qualitative analysis of comptroller reports and other resources. It reveals a growing gap between society’s expectations of the Ministry as a regulator and the Ministry’s capacities over five decades. Notably, it points to the variety of regulatory spaces that have appeared in a regulatory welfare state. The Israeli case is relevant for other countries that have experienced processes of outsourcing and privatization in the welfare state and whose ministries had to change their role.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Kimberly D. McKee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
International Adoption ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Transnational Adoption ◽  
American Imperialism ◽  
American Military ◽  
Military Industrial Complex

This chapter situates the origins of international adoption in the American military industrial complex and the localized effects of American imperialism abroad. The long-standing relationship between the United States and Korea elucidates how a single program laid the groundwork for international adoption programs across the globe. This chapter provides an overview for considering how the transnational adoption industrial complex facilitated the growth of a sustained phenomenon of globalized, social reproduction. As part of this analysis, this chapter discusses two new adoptee tropes—the adoptee killjoy and every adoptee—that were borne from the happy, grateful adoptee and angry, bitter adoptee stereotypes. The adoptee killjoy and every adoptee exist on a continuum of minor affects that arise in adoptees’ critiques of adoption practices.

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