Around the globe, the impacts of climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and rising ethno-nationalism and authoritarian politics are widening and intensifying economic and social inequalities. Over the past decade, movements such as Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, Occupy, and the Indignados have confronted States and elites challenging inequalities and mobilising for greater justice, democracy, and progressive policy changes. Social Policy: A Critical and Intersectional Analysis by Fiona Williams is a very timely book that offers a much-needed analysis of this complex, politically polarised, and rapidly changing landscape. The book builds on Williams’ earlier writings bringing a critical, feminist, and intersectional lens to the analysis and practice of social policy. Throughout the book, Williams considers the transformative potential of and prefigurative forms of action advanced by feminist, anti-racist, post/de colonial, and ecological movements and how the ideas emerging from these contemporary struggles for social justice are connected to social policy. Locating these struggles in the current context of neoliberal and austerity welfare, Williams examines how the current systems and structures are generating multiple and intersecting inequalities and invites the reader to consider the questions of how to ‘do’ social politics and how our lives together might be better lived (p. 1). These questions are highly relevant in the current zeitgeist as many now ask not only how we build back better, but how we build back differently.

The book is structured in three parts: Orientation, Analysis, and Praxis. In the first chapter of the Orientation section (i.e. Chapter 2), Williams introduces her theoretical framework for a critical and intersectional approach to social policy. She begins by acknowledging that the work and critiques by scholars of welfare states from feminist, anti-racist, political economy, disability, age, and ecology related perspectives have remained at the margins of social policy as a discipline. Citing the negative impacts of neoliberalism on the discipline and practice of social policy in the 1990s, she argues for the return of the social and draws together the commonalities, strengths, and insights of the respective critical approaches to demonstrate their significance for social policy. Williams challenges the separation of economic from other forms of injustice, and notes how many existing studies of inequality tend to focus on economic inequalities of wealth or income – without considering or making reference to other factors such as gender, ethnicity, race, or disability. Instead, she seeks to open up theoretical space at the heart of the discipline to elaborate how an intersectional approach, which provides an understanding of social inequalities and power as interconnected and multifaceted, can, on the one hand, elaborate and counteract the multiple social and economic inequalities and hierarchies of post-colonial and geopolitical realities and, on the other hand, allow for the consideration and elaboration of alternative futures and social relations. In Chapter 3, she applies the critical and intersectional framework developed in the previous chapter to examine the intersecting crises of care and social reproduction, climate change, and financialization in the context of contemporary neoliberal welfare states.

The second part of the book, Analysis, begins by exploring and (un)settling the relationship between family, nation, work, and nature over the past decade – from the adoption of austerity welfare in 2010 to the pandemic in 2020 (Chapter 4). It considers the impacts of the 2008 global financial crisis for government social policy and uses the framework of family-nation-work-nature to analyse how the four global crises of care, finance, the racialisation of borders, and environmental neglect have become constituted in social policy and the impacts these have on specific communities and welfare subjects. It is a difficult chapter to read as it catalogues the forms of social abjection, necropolitics, bordering practices and the devaluation of care and neglect of nature. Yet Chapter 5, which follows, shifts the focuses to consider the dynamics of agency and possibilities for transformation. In this chapter, and indeed throughout the book, Williams discusses the potential and limits of prefigurative politics and agency, considering how actors outside of the institutions and structures of power are a source of challenge and creativity in society and how movements, grassroots groups, and collectives are fertile spaces where actors question dominant structures, discourses, and ideas and imagine the unimaginable or utopian. Her relational approach to agency is grounded in and reflects the intersectional framework of the book –which considers how people’s agency in both everyday life and in political/strategic contexts is shaped by their locations in society, their subjectivities, relationships to others, access to resources and power, as well as emotions. This focus on agency in Chapter 5 leads into a discussion of contestation and resistance and how these operate in space of power and in specific policy domains.

The final part of the book, Praxis, examines, the ‘doing’ of social politics and how to advance an eco-welfare commons. Chapter 7 begins with the bold sentence, “There can be no going back”, which highlights the gravity of the problems we currently face and the current debates of how the pandemic, as a critical juncture, has created the opportunity for rethinking the status quo and imagining and articulating alternatives. Williams cites the work of many scholars and public intellectuals including Achille Mbembe, Rebecca Solnit, Ruth Lister, Marianne Mazzucatto, Kate Raworth and others who have written about how we need to consider how things can and must change, and to articulate the sort of world we want to inhabit. Drawing on Elinor Ostrom’s work, Williams proposes the idea of an eco-welfare commons, which is grounded in the struggles of care, the environment and decoloniality and an ethics of interdependence and intergenerational obligation. In developing the concept of the eco-welfare commons, Williams builds on the discussion in the previous chapters on intersectionality, power, and agency, and develops a number of ethical “turns” or approaches (i.e. the political ethics of care; environmental ethics; political ethics and decoloniality) to consider how these can inform praxis. She argues that the factors that connect the aforementioned ethical turns are their emphasis on relationality and planetary interdependence among human beings as well as between humans, non-human species, and nature. She also seeks inspiration from and examines the possibilities for change in contemporary movements considering the scales of possibility and locations of change (i.e. municipalism and community organizing) and the role and importance of dialogue and alliances.

The concluding chapter (Chapter 8) brings together the various threads and arguments of the book to consider the implications of these for social policy teaching, learning, and research and sets out an agenda for how to build back better. Williams contends that this can be done through a three-pronged approach of reconstituting knowledge: adopting relational knowledge and practices; and reimagining and reconstructing post-Covid-19 futures. I agree with Williams that we must reconstruct and reimagine differently and better after COVID. And, as we’ve seen historically, periods of crisis are critical junctures or moments of rupture that create windows of opportunity for transformations in social, political, and economic life, as different ways of doing things become conceivable to both policymakers and the public. However, while periods of crisis present opportunities for transformation, the direction of change is uncertain and policy outcomes are contingent on the alignment of actors, the strategic choices they make and the ideas or ideologies that resonate with them and influence their decisions.

The book’s focus on the agency of civil society actors – in particular to imagine, prefigure, and enact alternative social relations, practices of wellbeing and care, and ethical politics – is important; but, of course, these actors face barriers and great challenges in achieving structural and systemic changes. Williams acknowledges these challenges and maintains that the realization of the aforementioned political ethics is constrained by current economic, social, political, cultural and geo-political forms of organization and ideology as well as forms of epistemic justice (page 188).

I highly recommend Williams bold, imaginative, and theoretically rigorous, yet also very praxis-oriented book which not only recognizes the gravity and scale of the current multiple and interconnected crises, but (more importantly) advances an ethically grounded agenda for change. As many have argued, it is not enough to be against something, for change to happen, one must also be for something else. This book certainly achieves this and moreover, it is a well-written and highly stimulating book which is relevant for students, scholars, and practitioners of social policy.