Long before the financial meltdown of autumn 2008 revealed the fundamental limits of financial deregulation and reliance on regulation by market relations, policy makers in many countries recognised that neoliberalism had reached its social policy limits. Rising child poverty rates and growing numbers of working poor, as well as gaps in benefit coverage and imbalances in programme financing, had already led social policy makers to rethink neoliberalism's understanding of what relations ought to be among states and markets, communities and families. Indeed the mid-1990s brought the spread of new ideas about the social investment perspective (Jenson and Saint-Martin, 2003; see also Chapter Two in this volume).

This perspective has gained traction over the last 15 years and as it has done so ideas about social citizenship were transformed from those developed during the years of welfare state expansion described in Chapter Two. Social citizenship regimes that now rely on the social investment perspective are intended to sustain a knowledge-based and service economy, one quite different from that of the years after 1945 when welfare regimes were being built and consolidated. The announced goals of the social investment perspective are to increase social inclusion and minimise the intergenerational transfer of poverty as well as to ensure that the population is well-prepared for the likely employment conditions (less job security; more precarious forms of contracts) of contemporary economies. Doing so will supposedly allow individuals and families to maintain responsibility for their wellbeing via market incomes and intrafamily exchanges, as well as lessen the threats to welfare regimes and their programmes coming from ageing societies and family transformations.

Rather than advocating the minimalist state dear to neoliberals, proponents of the social investment perspective assign the state a key role in fostering these outcomes. In policy terms this implies increased attention to and investment in human capital, making work pay and early childhood, bringing new or different patterns of social spending: focused on education, particularly early childhood education; stressing support for labour market participation, particularly among categories such as lone parents and young parents; and seeking to make work pay, particularly for low wage and often service sector jobs.