Abstract
The Handbook on Urban Social Policies: International Perspective on Multilevel Governance and Local Welfare is a valuable resource for readers who want both a broad and deep understanding of how social policies are administered in the European context. Editors Yuri Kazepov, Eduardo Barberis, Roberta Cucca, and Elisabetta Mocca are motivated to fill a gap in the literature on comparative social policy: what is the territorial dimension of welfare policies, and, in particular, how are cities strategic sites of policy administration and implementation? The unique contribution of the volume stems from its careful attention to how multilevel governance structures interact to produce differential outcomes across territories.
The authors take space seriously. Rather than seeing policy interventions as playing out across undifferentiated landscapes, the chapters variously address how geographical perspectives contribute to analyses of social policy. They ask: what can an understanding of space as an active agent, not just as a container of social processes, contribute to the policy literature? The chapters forefront the dynamism of socio-spatial processes in shaping the outcomes of policies in the realms of poverty and welfare, migration, housing, and others. True to the interdisciplinary intent of the book, the authors come from a variety of fields, including political science, economics, and urban studies, though the majority are sociologists.
The handbook is divided into four sections. The broad theme of the first section is how social risks and vulnerabilities have been increasingly downscaled to the local level by processes such as policy reform, austerity, neoliberalization, and employment restructuring. Local social ecologies are key to understanding how social risks are felt, by whom they are felt, and how they are navigated and perhaps mitigated by local governance structures and citizens.
Section Two forefronts how the problems often defined as “urban,” for example, inequality, segregation, and housing affordability, are acutely influenced by the policy decisions made in non-urban realms (p. 16). The authors argue that we therefore need to understand how cities are embedded within multiscalar governance structures.
Section Three further surveys instruments of local social policies and how “local policies are embedded in multilevel governance arrangements characterized by high levels of interdependence across scales together with a horizontal coordination of interests, actors and organizations” (p. 17). The forefronting of specific actors and their strategies for navigating this policy terrain makes for some fascinating chapters. A piece by Peter Hupe and Trui Steen (Chapter 15) considers the localization of Dutch social welfare policies in recent years, asking if the scalar shift resulted in better performance and more democratic outcomes, as is often assumed. Their careful analysis of the co-production of policy among citizens, street-level bureaucrats, and politicians shows that we should be very skeptical of the excessive valorization of the local level, as it can mean more conflict and responsibility, and fewer resources.
The fourth and final section of the book includes more detailed case studies. Five of the eight case studies come from non-European contexts: Brazil, Japan, the United States, China, and Africa. While the book claims an “international perspective,” these five sections are the only non-European cases in a 28-chapter handbook. I really enjoyed these sections, but my concern is that they feel out of place here. I would like to either see greater attention to non-European cases or a more clearly defined European focus to the book. I fear that it does not do justice to scholars of the global South, or indeed to prospective readers, to have so few included in a tome with “international” in the title.
Many chapters conclude by considering the COVID-19 pandemic. I appreciate the scholars’ thoughtful, if quick and early, takes on how COVID has disrupted, reinforced, or otherwise transformed policy arenas and urban space. For example, Eduardo Barberis and Alba Angelucci’s interesting chapter (Chapter 12) on how the pragmatics of migration policy are most acutely felt at the local level provides some insightful concluding thoughts on how the pandemic will continue to unevenly impact migrants, furthering the “exacerbation of discriminating and boundary-making processes” (pp. 198–99).
As an urban geographer who focuses on the politics of U.S. cities, the goal of bringing a multiscalar understanding of policy initiatives feels essential but also a little surprising since it is at the heart of much geographical research. I believe this volume will make a strong case for those outside of Geography to see the benefits of assuming a spatial perspective. And for those like myself who specialize in the urban scale, the book is a crucial reminder that cities are embedded within other regulatory sites, like the nation-state.
My lingering question regarding the scope of the handbook is the omission of the “mobilities approach” (Urry 2007) and the global scale of policy formation, dissemination, and implementation. While mentioned in the introductory chapter, it is otherwise absent. As I pointed out earlier, perhaps because the title of the book asserts “international perspectives” I am curious as to the absence of the policy mobilities approach because it can contribute just that. The work of scholars such as Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore (2015) and Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward (2011) has pointed to the empirical reality of global policy mobility with “a critical concern for how policy is produced, mobilized, and implemented from elsewhere into new locations” (Lewis 2021:322–23). It also contributes theoretical and methodological tools (such as the distended case study) that could add more dimensions to many of the policy arenas discussed in the handbook, such as migration, education, and welfare.
Overall, the Handbook is a deep dive into European urban social policy that provides advanced graduate students and researchers detailed and current case studies revealing the complex spatiality of multilevel governance structures.