Abstract

From the Welfare State to the Social Investment State?
Making Sense of Social Policy Change in Canada

Jane Jenson and Denis Saint-Martin

This panel analyses the significant shift that has taken place in Canadian social policy since the mid-1990's. It begins with two observations. On the one hand, traditional perspectives that explain the early development of the welfare state prove to be inadequate for explaining the dismantling of traditional social policies and the recent social re-investment that have occurred in Canada and elsewhere during this period. On the other hand, theories of “welfare state retrenchment” and neo-liberalism also appear indadequate, since the era of budget cuts has been followed by renewed social spending and concern for “social cohesion”. However, this spending is not being used to reestablish or reinforce traditional welfare state policies. Instead, analyses reveal an important and global shift in policy ideas, designs and objectives. This panel explores whether, and how , this constitutes a truly paradigmatic shift in Canadian social policy, that could be characeterized as a shift from “welfare state” to “social investment state”. The papers present some of the Canadian results of an international, comparative study of new social policy strategies, made possible by a strategic research grant from SSHRC.

This paper provides an overview of the shift from a social expenditure perspective as the foundational principle of social policy in Canada to one that stresses the notion of “social investment.” It examines indicators of this shift, including among others, increased attention to “investing in children,” new ideas about responsibility, the popularity of the concepts of human capital and social capital as “investments,” and so on. It provides a theoretical approach for thinking about this shift, as well as a sketch of the re-balancing of social forces involved in making it happen.

Bios

Jane Jenson, Ph.D., FRSC, is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Université de Montréal/ McGill University Institute of European Studies. She has been the Director of the Family Network of Canadian Policy Research Networks since June 1999. She is also Editor of Lien social et politiques - RIAC, a franco-Quebec social policy journal. She has been a Visiting Professor at a number of European universities and at Harvard University, where she held the Mackenzie King Chair in Canadian Studies. In 2001 she was awarded a Canada Research Chair in Governance and Citizenship to held at the Université de Montréal. Her research interests and publications cover a wide spectrum of political analysis including social movements, the relationship between Quebec and the rest of Canada, citizenship, diversity, gender studies, family policy, child care and elder care. Her work in recent years has focussed on social policy and she currently holds two grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), one for an individual project on Citizenship Regimes and New Social Unions: Learning from Caring and a Strategic Grant for Fostering Social Cohesion: A Comparison of New Policy Strategies. Her most recent book (with Mariette Sineau) is Qui doit garder le jeune enfant? Les représentations du travail des mères dans l'Europe en crise (Paris: LGDJ, 1998). A substantially revised version appeared as Who Cares? Women's Work, Child Care and Welfare State Redesign (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).

Denis Saint-Martin, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Université de Montréal where he teaches public policy and administration. He obtained his doctorate in 1996 and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University until 1998. His research focuses on the relationship between the management consulting industry and the state, on public sector reform and the politics of expertise. He has published in various journals such as Governance, Administration & Society, Lien social et politiques, and the International Journal of Public Administration. He received the Herbert Kaufman Award for the best paper in public administration presented at the American Political Science Association's yearly conference in 1999. His new book, Building the New Managerialist State: Consultants and Public Management Reform in Comparative Perspective, has just been published in the UK by Oxford University Press. He is a co-researcher in the SSHRC strategic grant team, Fostering Social Cohesion: A Comparison of New Policy Strategies, headed by Jane Jenson.

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