Beyond Policy Design: Understanding Welfare Implementation and Policy Work

Understanding welfare policies requires opening the “black box” of implementation processes. Implementation is not an administrative stage but plays a crucial role in determining whether and how policy goals are realised and transformed. Moving beyond linear understandings of implementation, this panel starts from the assumption that welfare policies are interpreted, translated, negotiated and enacted within specific institutional, organisational and territorial settings.
With the analytical aim of linking macro, meso and micro levels, the panel brings to the foreground policy work in context, understood as the activities through which organisations and actors translate policies. This perspective highlights that implementation processes are embedded in contextual conditions rather than unfolding in a vacuum.
The panel invites contributions that explore mechanisms and conditions through which welfare policies are enacted across different contexts, and the outcomes produced. We welcome papers examining the role of organisational arrangements, inter-organisational networks, territorial characteristics, local welfare systems, and specific configurations of actors, resources and demands in shaping policy implementation.
Contributions may focus on different policy fields, including poverty and social assistance, labour market policies, migration, care, housing, health and education, looking at both Global North and Global South contexts. Studies adopting different theoretical perspectives, as well as qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods approaches, are welcome to advance our understanding of how welfare policies are continuously produced and transformed through their situated implementation.