Social policy incorporates a wide range of welfare state activities, across the five ‘scourges’ identified by Beveridge – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. There is a myriad of policies in all five of those areas, each bespoke to a particular issue; there is no uniform social policy. But there may be general principles that can be applied to many, if not all.
Most policies are addressed to the needs of individuals, but many are delivered to collectives – in a large number of cases, all of those in a population group living in a defined territorial area, usually that of a local government. Geographers have long criticised such approaches, which treat those areas simply as containers housing the target groups, to which standard policies are directed. This fails to appreciate the spatial variation in social and cultural characteristics that characterises most countries. Each is a melange of places, of areas – usually without clear boundaries – that have their own social/cultural/ economic/political structures that may differ in perhaps small but nevertheless important ways from their neighbours’. And those areas – places – are not passive receptacles; they are active in the constitution and reconstitution of local societies. People make places, and in turn places make people – a process that some decades ago Giddens termed structuration.
Social policy should take this active nature of places into account, according to Whitworth’s argument, therefore; it should recognise the specific features of individual places when directing interventions towards them, and realise that in different places the same policies may result in different outcomes. In other words, there is a need to deploy geography, its ‘concepts, perspectives, knowledges and methodological approaches’, when designing policies. (Whitworth occasionally changes the list – adding its ‘empirical, methodological and policy understanding’ in one place, for example, and ‘theoretical, methodological and empirical spatial insights’ in another.)
This edited book is designed to explore those ‘currently neglected deep upstream philosophical and conceptual linkages between human geography and social policy’. Following the editor’s introductory overview and argument it comprises three parts – Concepts, Themes and Methods – followed by a retrospective that provides a second overview.
The Concepts part comprises two chapters. That by Jones is a valuable summary of the localities research stimulated by Doreen Massey’s classic work and an ESRC funded programme in the 1980s. But that was almost entirely about economic restructuring and had little to say about social policy, however broadly defined. The chapter’s suggestions for future work focuses on uneven development, making strong arguments about the ‘contingency and relationality of localities’ but saying very little about ‘welfare localism’. It is followed by Philo’s excellent overview of Foucault as a ‘spatial historian of social policy’, of how space is deployed in the exclusion of some groups and the inclusion of others in the exercise of power to order and control society.
The four chapters in the second part provide examples of what a spatial social policy – or rather ‘geographically-informed social policies’? – do or might look like. That on Grenfell and housing policy is somewhat unconvincing, saying little on the ‘placemaking’ that might have been deployed in that case. Whitworth’s own example of employment support policy draws on HÄgerstrand and Harvey to argue how the co-location of services in space can improve access to them and so benefit individuals and households. Wiggan examines the role of localised investments in improving the life chances of young adults, whereby the state mobilises resources from a range of sources, including the private sector, to focus on the needs of specific groups in particular places. Finally, Pykett explores the growing body of work on behavioural economics/psychology that has underpinned the development of what have become known as ‘nudge’ policies designed to guide individual actions in particular directions rather than require it. And since, as she puts it, ‘individuals’ subjectivities and behaviours are always spatially rooted and networked’ (structuration again) an appreciation of geography, of the particular characteristics of places, is necessary to the appreciation of what policies will work where.
The final part comprises two excellent chapters – by Harris and by Orford and Webb – on methods. The first demonstrates how spatial statistics can be deployed to illustrate how policy impact varies across places by spatially decomposing universal models; the second introduces Geographical Information Systems as a means of ‘situating’ and spatially correlating data. But the book includes no case studies indicating that social policy analysts and/or makers are deploying them. The hope, presumably, is that the book will be read and the arguments accepted and implemented.
But will it? The book is not presented as a strong manifesto aimed at either social policy analysts in other social sciences than geography or at the creators of social policies: indeed it is not clear what audience it might attract – and stronger introductory and concluding chapters might have helped. There is now a ‘pan-government Head of Geography’ and a Government Science and Engineering profession within the UK civil service (described as ‘one of five government analytical professions that provide evidence for policy’ and which holds regular ‘Geographers in Government’ conferences), so the message has to some extent at least got home. So what is needed for wider audiences are more examples of how geography is being deployed in social policy design, delivery and analysis, and this book only partly does that. Many of the chapters are excellent, but the whole is no more than the sum of the parts. The case needs to be made more powerfully and in ways that will achieve not only influence but also change.
