Critical Social Policy

New policies have been developed in South Africa since the demise of apartheid. This article examines one of these policy documents - theWhite Paper for Social Welfare - using the lens of a feminist political ethic of care. The ethic of care is used to trace the normative framework of this policy document and to make judgements about how adequately issues of care, welfare and citizenship are dealt with. Policy texts display authoritative ways of talking about care and contain a range of gendered assumptions in the way that they represent social practices of care. The article proposes that the White Paper for Social Welfare inserts care principally into a familialist framework. This framework does not address current South African social problems in an adequate manner, nor does it correspond with social justice principles that are endorsed in the White Paper. The contribution that the ethic of care can make in solving the problems that are identified in the analysis of the White Paper for Social Welfare is elaborated on. It is proposed that care should be positioned in notions of citizenship rather than family or community. In this way, the responsibility for care would be deprivatized and made a common concern, centrally placed in human life.

This article seeks both to highlight a current imbalance in approaches to social identity in social policy and to make suggestions as to how this might be redressed in future work employing the concept. The concept of identity and specifically social identity is increasingly employed in the discipline of social policy as a theoretical device with which to bridge the individual/social divide. The argument presented here suggests that the concept is, however, unevenly deployed in policy analysis and therefore lacks the impact it might otherwise have had. The predominant focus of current analysis lies on policy change precipitated by groups of `new' active welfare constituents organized around differentiated and fragmented social identities, whereas the identities of welfare professionals also involved in the policy making process have disappeared from analytical view. The current emphasis on the discursive context of policy formulation perpetuates an unacknowledged misconception concerning the asociality of those involved in policy making, whereby their principal role is perceived as the maintenance of the status quo in terms of social policy responses to welfare constituents' needs. Redressing this false dichotomy between those developing and those using welfare services might be avoided by further exploring the concept of relational identity.

Joined-up government, modernizing government, community safety and multi-agency partnerships are explored here in an attempt to understand the contemporary `policing' of hate crime; in this instance, crimes and incidents motivated by homophobia (and transphobia). In the first half of the article, the focus is on the social and political context of the emergence of `participatory' modes of government and multi-agency `community safety' policing in response to the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act and the 1999 Local Government Act. In the second half of the article, the focus will be on the multi-agency response to homo-phobic and transphobic incidents and the policing of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (lgbt) community in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. In this case study, the main assumptions behind the attempt to create lgbt `active citizens' and `active communities' (active in their own policing) in Southampton, in particular, will be critically evaluated. The main points that will be raised here are: 1) the multi-agency response to homophobic incidents in Southampton prioritizes, first, improving efficiency and raising awareness in the agencies and services that are in contact with the lgbt community, and, second, opening lines of communication and building trust between police and the organizations and agencies `representing' the lgbt community; and 2)empowerment programmes such as these should not be taken at face value, but must be critically examined in relation to some of the following questions: who is and who is not being invited to be the active `lgbt' citizen here? And does the lgbt community's right to fair, sympathetic and equitable policing bring with it hidden and costly responsibilities?

This article seeks to challenge understandings of partnership in order to reframe the discussion of common problems of partnership working. The very term partnership has become so common as to have no clear meaning beyond being a `nice' alternative to long tried and tested forms of governance. Yet failing to understand the complexities that are inherent in the very nature of partnership poses serious dilemmas for those engaged in such schemes. Addressing the key dilemmas identified in studies of a number of regeneration partnerships, this article suggests the need to understand the dynamics of partnerships in the context of extant forms of governance. In so doing, it suggests the possibility of overcoming old dilemmas, if only to confront new ones.

The article addresses some recent attempts to reassess the contemporary child protection system as potentially liberating. These are, first, discussions of child protection in the context of theories of reflexive modernization and the risk society, and, second, postmodernist feminist writings. After initial theoretical debate about some of these perspectives, the authors go on to present ethnographic research evidence showing that social control is alive and well in child protection work. The article concludes that, while these recent optimistic accounts of the child protection system are welcome contributions, they have overstated the liberating potentials of the current system. While much of the discussion deals with child protection specifically, another aim of the article is to contribute to a debate about the application to social policy in general of theories of reflexive modernization and the risk society.