New Welfare Spaces: Labour Market Policies in the UK and Denmark

The ‘post Keynesian' shift in the welfare settlement involves the emergence of ‘workfare' as a dominant policy regime. Social benefits are increasingly conditional on the unemployed participating in activation programmes and major aspects of labour market policy delivery is devolved to local institutions. The book explores this theme through a comparison of two diverse welfare systems – the UK and Denmark and two city case studies Sheffield (UK) and Aalborg (DK). The book analyses the dynamics of spatial rescaling of welfare and the politics of geographical uneven development, revealing that the local is a site for innovation and adaptation and as a consequence plays a crucial role in mediating national welfare policy production. Second, political agency and actors within welfare-work policy regimes (trade unions and social movements)contest and negotiate workfare at different spatial scales, including the locality. ‘Localisation' as such involves the production of new welfare spaces which is inherently contradictory, unstable and contested. The book argues that an understanding of the role of the ‘local' as such is of importance to any assessment of future welfare trajectories.