The title of the book deliberately has a triple meaning, explored in this and the next two sections. First, it looks at the worlds of social policy in the comparative sense established by Esping-Andersen (1990) – that there are different welfare regimes, ways of arranging and organizing welfare provision based on different welfare relations, principles and mechanics. This approach to categorizing national welfare systems has dominated comparative study for a quarter of a century, providing insight and provoking further investigation in equal measure. While the ubiquity and impact of the ‘three worlds’ approach is undoubtedly sensed in general reading of international and comparative scholarship, in metric terms the study of ‘welfare regimes’ is indicated as the ‘leading topic’ in citation classics among key social policy journals (Powell, 2016). Since the 1990s, a significant critique and elaboration of this approach has contributed to its further embedding as a valid foundation for comparative research. Recent three worlds anniversary collections in the journal Social Policy and Society (2017) and Social Policy Review 27 (Irving et al., 2015) attest to the continuing influence of welfare state typologization as an analytical mainstay in comparing national welfare states and determining the factors that produce similarity and difference between them.
The welfare regime approach has, however, two important weaknesses. First, its limitations are most apparent where it is stretched beyond advanced welfare states (see Gough and Wood, 2004). Second, as an analytical approach it is more comfortably applied within some areas of social policy, particularly income security, than others. While it indicates essential parameters for the study of social policy around the world, these are most useful where the idea of regimes is used to suggest political and cultural characteristics that cluster and seemingly suggest determinants of change, rather than as an analytical prison that reduces debate to the accuracy of the typologies produced. This is particularly the case when attention is directed beyond countries with established welfare state architectures.
The second way in which the book looks at the world of social policy, is in the geographical sense, drawing on examples and systems from across the globe. In the twenty-first century, while it is possible to evidence many claims that the world is a better place than it has ever been – that human rights are more protected, that there are fewer social and geographical divisions and that more people have more power to determine the course of their lives than ever before – this has been an uneven development, and potential setbacks are only too evident today. Where global social progress has occurred, social policy has been central to its achievement, but because analysis of social policy is often restricted to the realm of established welfare state institutions, its wider arrangements and contribution outside of formal structures are less recognized, or at least less well integrated into policy debate and discussions of social politics centred in the global North. Because social policy is associated with recognizable administrative structures, distinctions often made between national categories, such as ‘mature’ welfare states, ‘emerging economies’ and ‘low-income countries’, carry the assumption that nation states remain the most important socio-political and policy units, an assumption that is challenged in the contemporary global circumstance.
The significance of the nation state has been a matter of debate within the globalization literature since the 1990s (for example Ohmae, 1990; McGrew and Lewis, 1992; Rhodes, 1994; Mishra, 1998; Pierson, 2001). The perceived strength or weakness of national actors divides perspectives in international political economy, and contrasts perspectives on the state as a ‘zombie category’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) in the new forms of governance, with those that see the state as an enduring locus of government. The focus on ‘methodological nationalism’ has similarly vexed some analysts of social policy where comparative analysis of worlds of welfare capitalism (Esping-Andersen, 1990) and families of nations (Castles, 1999) has been argued to neglect both the transnational character of Western welfare state development and the rising influence of global actors, organizations and collectives on contemporary welfare evolution across the world.
In considering countries themselves, there is debate regarding the porous borders of welfare state development in the global North, and contestation of the idea that developed welfare states were ever ‘national’ or formed and managed within national borders (Clarke, 2005). This is not only because national borders themselves are subject to change, as secession, independent statehood, annexation and state formation shape and reshape countries geographically. The movement of people also means that ‘national’ populations have always been fluid, with consequent differentials in (welfare) citizenship. Additionally, however, as Clarke (and others, for example Williams, 1995) points out, the welfare states of advanced economies have been built on the labour and contribution of migrants. In Europe in particular, its place in the history of colonialism combined with the post-war expansion of a regionalist supranational organization, the European Economic Community, to become the European Union, has created a further European context for social policy development which sometimes overrides, sometimes follows and otherwise interacts with the ‘national’.
Analyzing ‘welfare states’ rather than social policy necessarily drives attention to the ‘state’ itself, and relatedly to the focus on ‘national’ units as the subject of study. Historically, this has made sense as national political events since 1945, such as the strength of national labour movements, their capacities in formal politics and their alliances with other interest groups such as the parties representing the middle classes or farmers, have shaped what are now the formally established systems of welfare provision in the global North. In the balance of provision within these systems, the roles and responsibilities of the state emerged as most influential in the achievement of social welfare, and a focus on state intervention therefore often overshadowed the activities of other non-state actors. From the 1970s, a backlash against state intervention began to gain political and popular support, leading to much greater interest in the activities of market actors, families and non-governmental (‘third-sector’) organizations and their place in the mixed economy of welfare.
There has been a more sustained contemporary academic critique of the problem of ‘methodological nationalism’ which characterizes comparative social policy scholarship and treats states (and their welfare arrangements) as stable, easily defined units of comparison. It is argued that this approach omits the increasingly important transnational and global influences, interests, actors and activities which, in many countries, have greater significance for welfare outcomes than those which are nationally confined (see Yeates, 2002, 2007; Wimmer and Schiller, 2003; Deacon, 2005, 2007). ‘International’ social policy is equally prone to this national categorization, especially where ‘international’ simply means the discussion alongside each country’s welfare arrangements and applies international in the sense that the countries described stretch beyond Europe (for example Alcock and Craig, 2001). The development of the subfield of global social policy (Deacon, 1997) was thus an important break from a scholarly focus on national actors to shift attention to the extremely powerful but under-researched interests and influences that operate in the global and transnational sphere. In this sphere, the ideas, desires and influences of political and economic actors, including international governmental organizations (IGOs) such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and United Nations (UN) as well as transnational businesses, aid organizations and activist networks, are all significant in shaping not only the general tone of social policy debate at the world level but also the development and implementation of social policies in individual countries and across world regions. The regionalization of social policy has itself become of much more direct significance and consequently of academic concern in the 2000s (Kaasch and Stubbs, 2014).
This is not to say that the role of interests beyond formal state institutions have been neglected. Historical analyses are clear that they also have their part to play – the medical profession in the emergence of the British welfare state for example, or the role of business actors in lobbying and shaping developments to minimize their costs or maximize their power. However, the operation of these interests was somewhat less complex in the