So-called activation policies aiming at bringing jobless people into work have been a central component of welfare reforms across OECD countries during the last decades. Such policies combine restrictive and enabling programs, but their characteristic feature is that enabling programs are also mandatory, and non-compliers are sanctioned. There are four main arguments that can be used to defend mandatory activation of benefit recipients. We label them efficiency, sustainability, paternalism, and justice. Each argument is analysed in turn. First we clarify which (...) standards it invokes, thereafter we evaluate each argument according to its own standards and introduce competing normative concerns that have to be taken into account. (shrink)

This paper discusses the conditions for legitimate expert arrangements within a democratic order and from a deliberative systems approach. It is argued that standard objections against the political role of experts are flawed or ill-conceived. The problem that confronts us instead is primarily one of truth-sensitive institutional design: Which mechanisms can contribute to ensuring that experts are really experts and that they use their competencies in the right way? The paper outlines a set of such mechanisms. However, the challenge exceeds (...) that of producing epistemically optimal expert deliberations because a deliberative political system must also fulfil the ethical and democratic requirements of respect and inclusion. Yet, epistemic concerns justify expertise arrangements in the first place, and measures taken to make the use of expertise compatible with these requirements have to balance the potential rewards from expertise against potential deliberative costs. In the final part of the paper, the regulatory framework of a best practice expert advice system is tentatively analysed to illustrate the applicability and critical potential of our approach. (shrink)

The special issue focuses on the impact of antipoverty measures—accounting for social and structural dimensions in the poverty experience and moving beyond an income-only focus—in five country cases: China, India, Norway, Uganda, and the United States. Particularly, we focus on the implications of shame in the delivery of antipoverty measures, as an individual and social phenomenon that relates to feelings of self-inadequacy, as well to a lack of dignity and recognition. We analyze delivery interactions through an analytic framework of rights, (...) discretion and negotiation, as this enables us to parse out how policy delivery interactions presumed or enabled individual choice, ability, control, and voice. We suggest social citizenship can structure the relationships between welfare recipients and administrators. As a concept, it expands the objects of social rights beyond the materiality of human life to include intangible processual elements in the construct of rights. (shrink)

This article examines how the existence of unpredictability should influence the quest to promote distributive justice in education. First, the article briefly discusses resource allocation in education finance policy and its relationships with existing philosophical theories of distributive justice. It then explains why unpredictability comes into play in education and how this endangers the achievements of distributive justice. It is argued that unpredictability poses a real challenge to enhancing educational justice. Second, the article examines the common policy conception that educational (...) justice can best be promoted by reducing unpredictability through means of increased control. It is maintained that the costs of this solution exceed its benefits. Finally, the article offers alternative routes for dealing with unpredictability in educational resource allocations. It is argued that we have good reasons, both normative and practical, to embrace a new approach for furthering distributive justice in education that takes into account the complexity of the educational system. (shrink)

Social workers must often decide about priority at a case level, in a context of scarce resources. These decisions are disputable and controversial, which raises the question on what grounds are they made in practice. This article addresses that question through an empirical study of real-life case discussions in youth care in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. Toulmin’s argumentation model is used to analyse the data. The study finds that most case discussions are processed in a rather technical manner. (...) But where there is active deliberation, key incidents show that the decision-makers undertake active and personal interpretation of the situation at hand, and that they also take a personal stance on the criteria for assigning priority. In other words, their practice can be understood as a hermeneutical activity. The article’s main conclusion is that the prioritisation process illustrates the moral-political core that is present in any social work decision-making practice. As this moral-political core seems to be hidden most of the time behind a technical-rational approach, questions remain whether the professionals involved are aware that it characterises their own judgements and whether insights into its nature are stimulated. (shrink)

While the substantiation of “best interests” has received much attention, the question of how “the child” is conceptualised to ensure any action taken or decision made is in the particular child’s best interests has been largely neglected. In this paper, I argue that the lack of robust understanding of who “the child” is means that we continue to make many generalisations and category-based assumptions in determining the child’s best interests. In addressing the challenge of doing right by the individual child, (...) I propose a three-step approach based on a theoretical model of the child that avoids presumptions about child-typical needs and insists on an assessment of the child’s individual characteristics, needs, qualities, and circumstances, making it the only conceptualisation fully meeting the child centrism criterion required by children’s rights as determined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. (shrink)