The Governance of Social Investment Policies in Comparative Perspective: Long-Term Care in the UK, Japan, and Korea

Given the demographic shift coupled with the transition toward a service economy, care services have become a key social investment policy in lately industrialised societies in East Asia, as well as the Western advanced industrial democracies. The recent debates about how to improve social care services highlight co-governance in welfare mix – or ‘care diamond’ – and multi-level governance in the shape of a better balance between hierarchical decision-making and principles of decentralisation (Evers, Lewis & Riedel 2005). What are the distinctive features of welfare mix and multi-level governance in social care services in three different welfare states (the UK, Japan, and Korea) that share the common ideas and practices, namely the prominent welfare role of the private sector? The effective governance of social investment policies, including care services, relies on not merely the programmatic characteristics of policy, but also the organisation, administration and delivery of policy (Carmel and Papadopoulos, 2003; Borghi and van Berkel, 2007). Nonetheless, the existing literature on social investment policies has concentrated primarily on the content of policy (e.g., coverage and finance) and its decision-making dimension, often ignoring or downplaying the implementation arena where policy content is put into effect. Therefore, this chapter attempts to investigate a mode of governance in the implementation arena with a specific focus on long-term care for the elderly in the three countries. The mode of governance does not occur in a social vacuum, but is placed within a historically specific set of political and institutional dimensions. Particular attention will be paid to how the legacies of political and administrative institutions (e.g., vertical and horizontal integration) differentiate the actual operation of the governance, which is the cornerstone for understanding and comparing care regimes, but under-discussed issues in the studies of social investment reforms and their effects.