Local administrative units are crucial to the reconstruction of a sustainable multi-ethnic social consensus in fragile states. Using the delivery of public goods and social services in Bosnia and Herzegovina as our case study, we ask whether the level of heterogeneity in community composition has any effect on resident opinion of public services at the municipal level. We find that post-war residency status is not the only factor defining community-level heterogeneity and that evaluations of public services at the local level are not neutral to community composition.

Many welfare states have embraced choice and market mechanisms since the 1990s. With respect to welfare users, it has been argued that this led to a change from citizens to consumers. This paper challenges this observation and discusses changes of welfare user roles in the German welfare state. The main argument rests on the assumption that user roles are much more complex and include claimants and co-producers in addition to citizens and consumers. Based on this heuristic model of multiple user roles, empirical evidence for user roles in pension insurance, health care and schools is presented. Indeed, we observe a shift towards consumers in many fields of welfare provision, but German users are still largely addressed as claimants and citizens. Moreover, they are acting as active co-producers, entitled claimants, subversive consumers and needy patients.

Though they improve upon the millennium development goals (MDGs), the new sustainable development goals (SDGs) have important draw-backs. First, in assessing present deprivations, they draw our attention to historical comparisons. Yet, that things were even worse before is morally irrelevant; what matters is how much better things could be now. Second, like the MDGs, the SDGs fail to specify any division of labor to ensure success. Therefore, should progress stall, we won't know who is responsible to get us back on track. We won't “end poverty in all its forms everywhere” without an agreement on who is to do what. Third, although the SDGs contain a goal calling for inequality reduction, this goal is specified so that the reduction need not start till 2029. Such delay would cause enormous death and suffering among the poor and enable the rich to shape national and supranational design in their own favor.

Socio-legal status determines the differential rights to residence, work and social welfare that accrue to migrants depending on their particular immigration status. This paper presents analysis of original empirical data generated in qualitative interviews with migrants who had both made a claim for asylum and experienced conditions of forced labour in the UK. Following an outline of the divergent socio-legal statuses assigned to individual migrants within the asylum system, early discussions in the paper offer a summary of key aspects and indicators of forced labour. Subsequent sections highlight the significance of socio-legal status in constructing such migrants as inherently vulnerable to severe exploitation. It is concluded that immigration policy and, more particularly, the differential socio-legal statuses that it structures at various stages of the asylum process, helps to create the conditions in which severe exploitation and forced labour are likely to flourish among asylum seekers and refugees in the UK.

Have increasing levels of conditionality fundamentally changed the attitudes of the unemployed towards social security, work obligations and welfare dependency? Both neopaternalist and governmentalist theorising suggests that workfare policies should have shifted this group's conceptions of self-interest over time yet previous evidence has been rather mixed. This article makes a fresh contribution to the literature by drawing upon New Zealand Election Study data (1990–2014) and New Zealand qualitative data (2007–2008; 2014) to analyse the attitudes of “undeserving” unemployed benefit recipients who are subject to work obligations over 21 years and by comparing their attitudes to those of “deserving” benefit recipients not subject to work obligations (the retired and students) and wage/salary earners. It finds a notable hardening of unemployed people's attitudes towards some welfare dependency propositions over time and evidence of “self-governing rationalities” being adopted by some unemployed individuals but, overall, attitudes amongst this group remain nuanced and ambivalent.

This article explores the association between intergenerational social mobility and attitudes towards income differences in post-socialist societies. I hypothesise that based on the psychological mechanism of self-serving bias in causal attribution, those who experience upward social mobility are more likely to support greater income differences, and that subjective intergenerational mobility has stronger association with attitudes towards income differences than objective mobility because individuals filter their objective environment in order to derive their subjective perceptions of the world and their own experiences. The described hypotheses are tested with two cross-national data sets – European Values Studies and Life in Transition Survey. The derived findings are robust to alternative statistical specifications and indicate that individuals who perceive themselves as subjectively mobile have significantly different attitudes towards income differences in comparison to non-mobile groups, but that this effect does not manifest among objectively mobile individuals.

The article develops a discourse about equality for children and their recent evolution from adult-centred consideration to definition as a separate, critical constituency as stated in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with their child-focused goals and targets. Challenges implementing equality and fairness are discussed, from the World Summit for Children (WSC) in 1990 to the nearly simultaneous ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which gives children agency through its legally binding clauses, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The article reviews past lessons learned and the post-2015 agenda debate, from which worldwide agreement evolved about multidimensional poverty and an equality roadmap. The article suggests social accountability processes to achieve lasting SDG targets. It provides a methodology for implementing social accountability actions, accompanied by examples to mobilise communities and encourage child and youth participation at the local level.

We present evidence on the distributive politics of social transfers implemented in the context of a capable bureaucracy and the absence of a clientelistic machine-party system; where the usual distinction between “core” and “swing” voter investments falls short. Using evidence from Chile, the paper illustrates a selective distributive politics scenario in which, at the margins of fair socioeconomic targeting, incumbents might seek to enhance their political returns by implementing a highly diversified investment portfolio that includes the pursuit of both electoral and non-electoral goals. Non-electoral goals might be more effectively accomplished through selective distributive politics. The empirical evidence is based on a series of seemingly unrelated-regression models generated using a database on the allocations of six different social programs in 345 municipalities over a nine-year period. Our findings and theory discourage the mechanical translation of investment rationales across cases, while promoting a broader and more contextualized analysis of distributive politics.

This article assesses the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in terms of their contribution to improved global social governance. As a global policy-making process they are commended. As a set of global social policy aspirations the SDGs are the first global social policy. In terms of the contributions the SDG document makes to improving the architecture of global social governance it is found to fail. It fails in the field of global redistribution, global taxation, global regulation and in the field of the realisation of global social rights. The SDGs document embodies a reversal in policy-making away from a concern to construct improved global governance institutions back to an era of strengthening national sovereignty. The anti-structural adjustment sentiments of the 1980s cast their shadow over attempts to construct a socially responsible globalisation in the 2010s. The SDGs do make suggestions regarding the role of regionalism in meeting the goals and targets and indeed the article suggests reforms in regional social governance might be a more productive route to follow.

VAT is an important but at the same time long neglected issue in social policy literature. The way in which taxes are levied has important implications for citizens in terms of equity and efficiency effects. Rate diversification is embedded in VAT planning across the EU, which enables Member States to address particular welfare objectives and tackle VAT's regressivity. Nonetheless, for some, this undermines the uniformity and effectiveness of a pan-European VAT system comprised of the so-called ideal single-rate VAT structure which could bring more money into state budgets and, thus, allow for more generous welfare provision. This paper evaluates arguments put forward by both sides, concluding that in times of crisis, where governments might advance VAT streamlining purely in order to deal with deficit constraints instead of fairer redistribution, the regime currently in place is the most pragmatic solution from a pro-welfare perspective.

This paper provides an analysis of Chile's 35 year experience with defined contribution, fully funded pensions and argues that this pension approach should not be emulated by countries seeking to reduce the state role in the provision of pensions. The paper shows that 35 years of privatized pensions have led to a massive accumulation and concentration of capital and profits in the hands of the pension fund administrators and insufficient and unequal pensions for the retirees. This legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship has experienced marginal reforms after the transition to democracy. However, those reforms have not altered the system's structure and have augmented the fiscal role as the state attempts to repair some the most damaging outcomes of the private pension scheme.

The paper examines the notion of global justice in the changing context of International Relations and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) approved by world leaders in 2015. Structural differentiation of states and the international system is presented as a way to explain limitations and possibilities in the quest of poverty eradication and global justice. The paper ends by assessing how international poverty law and human rights approaches can team up in the search for accountability, defined as the key to transit towards a more just world. It concludes that the political and legal responsibilities emerging from the universal policy agenda of the SDGs (to be implemented according to rights and obligations of states under international law) could pave the way towards global (social) justice.

For those disadvantaged by bias and barriers based on socioeconomic status (SES), constitutions can provide a defense against discrimination and a foundation for greater equality in social, economic, and political life. In light of the near-global commitment to a multi-dimensional poverty reduction agenda and the increased inclusion of marginalized groups in constitution-drafting processes, this article examines how 193 constitutions address SES and how this has changed over time. The majority of constitutions guarantee equal access to primary education across SES (59%) and prohibit discrimination on this basis (58%). Fewer guarantee access to healthcare (20%), equal rights in employment (15%), eligibility for legislative office (4%), and voting rights (4%) across SES. Constitutions adopted after 1990 are considerably more likely to protect equal rights across SES than older ones. However, 25% of constitutions – including 17% of those adopted since 1990 – restrict political participation based on socioeconomic characteristics.

The UN 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development impresses with its ambition of transformation, and because it has succeeded in marrying economic, social and environmental goals. This article looks at two interrelated questions. It asks whether and to what extent the Agenda's goals are transformative, but finds numerous omissions and clashes. It also seeks to examine whether the Agenda refers to eco-social policy. Two schools of thought are examined. Both critical theory and sufficiency economics propose shifts in norms, policies and practice – and argue for a “hierarchy reversal”, whereby social and climate justice goals override the economic rationale. The article concludes with a case for instrumentalising the commitments of the 2030 Agenda, but complemented by a subversive approach – injecting radical thinking and action for economic, environmental and social justice. Whether this could succeed in light of political constellations is open, and requires an idealistic faith in the power of ideas.