Jenson, Jane - Lost in Translation. The Social Investment Perpective and Gender Equality PDF

JA N E J E N S O N
Lost in Translation: The Social

Investment Perspective and
Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

Gender Equality
Abstract
The social investment perspective is replacing standard
neoliberalism in Latin America as well as Europe. With it come
ideas about social citizenship that reconfigure the citizenship
regimes of the three regions. The responsibility mix is equilibrated
to give a greater role for the state, although as investor rather than
spender; access to citizenship rights shifts to incorporate the
excluded and marginalized; and governance practices alter to
emphasize decentralization to the local and the community. The
main idea of the social investment perspective is that the future
must be assured by investing in children and ending the interge-
nerational transmission of disadvantage. With this set of child-
centered policy ideas, the equality claims of adult women and
attention to their needs are sidelined in favor of those of children,
including girls.
In the mid-1990s neoliberalism was being challenged by

alternative ideas about economic and social relations. As political
space for new perspectives widened, the discourse and practices of
international as well national and sub-national social policymakers
began to cohere around new ideas about social politics.
Winter 2009 Pages 446–483 doi:10.1093/sp/jxp019
# The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions,
please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Advance Access publication November 12, 2009
Lost in Translation V 447
Summarizing the direction of change, Bruno Palier wrote of an idea-

tional revolution that would “replace traditional and static social
policies, ones that aim to repair the most difficult situations or
replace lost income, with a dynamic vision that takes into account
individual trajectories, the risks of the knowledge economy, and the
emergence of new inequalities across genders, the generations, and
social groups in post-industrial economies . . . . In other words, this
involves going from a welfare state that is a ‘nurse’ to one that is an
‘investor’” (Palier 2008, 5–6, our translation).

The notion of “investment” and particularly “social investment”
underpins this policy perspective.1 We will argue here—as elsewhere
(Jenson and Saint-Martin 2006; Jenson 2008; forthcoming)—that
there is convergence around the key objectives of a social investment
citizenship regime in ways that are comparable to the consensus that
occurred in the post-1945 years.2 This is happening in both Europe
and Latin America, again just as after 1945.3 Then, systems of social
protection in Europe and the Americas were grounded in the shared
objective of providing a measure of social security via health, pensions,
unemployment, and other programmes to the worker and his family in
a primarily industrial economy.4 Social citizenship regimes that rely on
the social investment perspective are intended to sustain a different
economy—the knowledge-based and service economy (Palier 2008,
8–9). The announced goals are to increase social inclusion and mini-
mize the intergenerational transfer of poverty as well as to ensure that
the population is well prepared for the likely employment conditions
(less job security; more precarious forms of employment) of contem-
porary economies. Doing so will allow individuals and families to
maintain responsibility for their well-being with market incomes and
intra-family exchanges, as well as lessening the threats to social protec-
tion coming from ageing societies and higher dependency ratios.
Not all jurisdictions in Europe and Latin America have embraced
the ideas of social investment at exactly the same time or with the same
enthusiasm, of course.5 Nor is social investment the only strategy on
offer for modernizing social policy (Knijn, this volume). Nonetheless,
over the past 15 years there has been convergence around a package of
ideas about modernization, social inclusion, and social investment that
have reworked policy positions of both post-1945 social protection
systems and those of neoliberalism (Jenson and Saint-Martin 2003,
2006). These notions call neither for a return to the practices of
post-1945 social policy nor for a complete rejection of neo-liberalism.6
Ideas about how to reform “traditional” social protection co-exist with
those for constraining the forces of market fundamentalism to form the
social investment perspective, as Part I of the article documents. This
convergence in ideas is presented via an examination of three
448 V Jenson
dimensions of social citizenship that in combination form a new citi-

zenship regime. The first task of the article is to document this shift on
each dimension of the regimes in two regions, Europe and Latin
America.
One of the innovations of the social investment perspective is that
ideas about gender differences and circumstances as well as the
unequal gendering effects of employment and family life are front and
center in this policy discourse. Gender awareness is a distinguishing
feature (Molyneux 2006). Attention to the situation of women and to

gender relations in families distinguishes the social investment perspec-
tive from previous policy discourses. During the so-called Golden Age
after 1945 welfare regimes had clear gendering effects that followed as
a direct consequence of relying on the male breadwinner as citizenship
norm (Hernes 1988, 190). Latin American welfare regimes were never
gender-blind, either: “Built into the earliest forms of social provision
were assumptions of female dependency on a male breadwinner which
positioned women as under the protection of ‘their’ men, whether hus-
bands or fathers” (Molyneux 2006, 427).
Now, it is common for male policy intellectuals and policy com-
munities to begin their analysis by asserting the collapse of that
norm.7 They explicitly anchor their analysis with considerations of
the distribution of care work (for the dependent elderly as well chil-
dren) at the same time as they promote increased rates of female
labor force participation.8 The latter focus more often than not also
includes attention to the need for better regulation of forms of
employment (service sector, part-time), in part because they are the
most feminized sectors of most labor markets.9
This gender awareness follows from political mobilization, of
course. The orienting effects of the male breadwinner model were
quite invisible to policy-makers until feminist critiques pointed it out.
These critiques bloomed as part of post-1960s women’s movements
that were organized around claims for gender equality at home as
well as at work, in politics as well as the economy, and in all forms
of power relations. Movements at the national and international
levels pressed their claims for equality of outcomes as well as against
discrimination and for full citizenship rights. In a global review of
second-wave women’s movements and the issues around which they
mobilized, Nelson and Chowdhury (1994, 10ff.) identified three key
types of demands. Alongside those for safety and security and those
for reproductive rights and health were equality claims. This third
type of demands (Nelson and Chowdhury 1994, 13):
represent attempts to improve women’s access to existing edu-

cation, employment, healthcare, credit and other resource
opportunities and ultimately to make those resources more

responsive to women’s needs . . . . In their demands for greater
access to and substantive equality in the distribution of
resources, women are posing a fundamental question of distri-
butive justice: Can a society have equality, even equality of
opportunity, without a social commitment to distributive
justice that understands the sex-gender organization of life?
The second task of the article, undertaken in Part II, is to address
the following questions: does the social investment perspective offer

an approach to gender relations that responds to women’s equality
claims and ambitions for full citizenship rights? Does its gender
awareness translate into the egalitarianism many feminists have
advocated since the 1960s? Do the child-centered and human capital
foci of the social investment strategy reinforce an agenda for gender
equality, as some policy intellectuals assume?
In asking these questions this article starts from the assumption that
“ideas matter.”10 Actors in public policy domains make choices about
policy design based on their understandings of the challenges and pro-
blems they face. For example, where one policy-maker sees the “struc-
tural effects of long-term disadvantage” another may see “laziness.”
Where one advocacy group or social movement sees “child poverty”
another may see “the feminisation of poverty.” There is representational
content to any action on the part of policy-makers and citizens, and rep-
resentation involves “the power to give meaning to social relations and
thereby to represent and dispute over ‘interests’” (Jenson 1990, 663).11
It is therefore important to analyze the idea sets in political dis-
course, not because they “cause” anything independently of actors’
interests, but because they always give shape to actors’ representations
of their interests inside institutions and political struggles (Jenson
1989, 237–38). This analytic position rejects, in other words, the
current analytic propensity to weigh the “effects” of ideas as compared
to material interests, or ideas in comparison to institutions and inter-
ests.12 As Max Weber taught us almost a century ago, and as feminists,
historical institutionalists, and many others have documented since:
“Not ideas, but material interests, directly govern men’s conduct. Yet
very frequently the ‘world images’ that have been created by ‘ideas’
have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has
been pushed by the dynamic of interest” (Weber 1946, 280).
From Social Protection to Social Investment: Reconfiguring

Citizenship Regimes
The social investment perspective represents an approach to social
citizenship different from the social protection logic of the three
450 V Jenson
decades after 1945 as well as the safety-net stance of neoliberals.13

One key ideational shift involves ideas about time. In the three
decades of the postwar boom, the here-and-now was the most
important moment in time. Inequalities, inequities, and challenges in
the present were to be addressed in the present, by for example,
reducing poverty by means of transfers. During its heyday in the
1980s, neoliberalism shifted the time horizon towards the future.
Where neo-liberalism was well implanted—particularly in liberal
welfare regimes and some international organizations—a key notion

was that social policy in the present would have an impact on the
future. Usually this impact was seen as a negative one, perpetuating
“dependency” and raising public debt that would “burden future
generations.” The social investment perspective also looks to the
future but in a somewhat different way. In contrast to neoliberalism
that focused on restoring market forces “displaced” by social
spending, in the social investment perspective the state may have a
legitimate role if it acts to increase the probability of future profits
and positive outcomes. This objective-setting in future terms is
exemplified by the overriding concentration, now shared by policy
communities in Europe and Latin America, on breaking the interge-
nerational cycle of poverty and disadvantage rather than on ending
poverty (Esping-Andersen et al. 2002, 22; ECLAC 2007, Chapter V,
for example). It is also seen in a reframing of the fears about the
challenge of ageing societies, with the proposal “to support families
with children as an investment in the future tax base” in order to
prepare for higher costs of future pensions (Lindh, Malmberg, and
Palme 2005, 482).
These differences in the notion of time underpin the two lists of
values provided in Box 1. The first column is a summary by Robert
Goodin et al. (1999, 22) of the “six moral values which welfare
states have traditionally been supposed to serve,” with “tradition-
ally” meaning since 1945. The second column is the list provided by
the British Labour Party’s Commission on Social Justice, whose
report in 1994 was one of the signs that the social investment per-
spective was taking shape (Dobrowolsky and Jenson 2005, 207).
The differences are important if subtle, being more ones of verb
use—and therefore timing—than of end goals. See for example the
different ways of presenting an anti-poverty goal: one list promises
to reduce poverty where it occurs, while the other seeks to prevent
it, only promising relief when absolutely necessary. Note also the
concern with the life-cycle present in the second list but absent from
the first. Finally the “traditional” list promises to promote equality;
the second does not mention it.
Box 1. Social Values Compared.
Moral values traditionally associated Values identified for a social investment

with the post-1945 welfare statea welfare systemb
Promoting economic efficiency Protect people against risks in the labor
market and from family change
Reducing poverty Prevent poverty where possible and
relieve it where necessary

Promoting social equality Redistribute resources from richer to
poorer members of society
Promoting social integration and Redistribute resources of time and
avoiding social exclusion money over people’s life-cycle
Promoting social stability Promote social cohesion
Promoting autonomy Encourage personal independence
a
List compiled by Goodin et al. (1999, 22).
b
List compiled by the British Labour Party’s Commission on Social Justice (Goodin
et al. 1999, 22).
The ideas underpinning the social investment perspective shape

spending strategies. As the 2007 Peruvian anti-poverty law put it:
“we have to move from a vision based on social spending to one
based on social investment.”14 The final communiqué of the OECD
social ministers in 2005 was just as blunt: “social policies must be
pro-active, stressing investment in people’s capabilities and the
realisation of their potential, not merely insuring against misfor-
tune” (quoted in Jenson 2007, 27). For public outlays to be effective
and therefore worthwhile they must not simply be consumed in the
present to meet current needs; they should be an investment that will
pay off and reap rewards in the future.
Ideas about time also shape policy instruments. Statistical tools
such as those informed by life-course perspectives are favored over
cross-sectional measures of the here-and-now, precisely because they
reveal long-term consequences of critical life transitions (Palier
2008, 12; Lindh, Malmberg, and Palme 2005, 476). As the Belgian
Minister for Social Affairs and Pensions, Frank Vandenbroucke, suc-
cinctly put it: “The life course perspective is also highly relevant
from a practical policy point of view. Indeed we should firmly keep
in mind that good pension policies – like good health policies –
begin at birth” (Esping-Andersen et al. 2002, xvi). A focus on the
future also directs policy-makers’ policy evaluations to results and to
outcome measures rather than to how much is spent by whom,
which was the focus of earlier instruments for policy evaluation.
452 V Jenson
All of these shifts in ideas about time and about appropriate

policy instruments underpin new ideas and practices about social
citizenship. Therefore, in order to map the ideas about social citizen-
ship that are promoted from within the social investment perspective
and to compare them systematically to earlier ideas, I will use the
heuristic of the citizenship regime.15 This is an analytic grid that
permits one to make visible several intersecting dimensions of social
citizenship:
1. basic values about the responsibility mix. These define the

boundaries of state responsibilities and differentiate them from
those of markets, of families, and of communities in the “welfare
diamond.”16 The result is a definition of “how we wish to
produce welfare,” whether via purchased welfare, via the recipro-
city of kin, via collective support in communities, or via collective
and public solidarity, that is state provision and according to the
principle of equality among citizens.
2. formal recognition of particular rights and duties (civil, pol-
itical, social, and cultural; individual and collective). A citizenship
regime establishes the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion of a
political community. In doing so, it identifies those entitled to full
citizenship status and those who only, in effect, hold second-class
status as well as those who are not citizens.
3. the governance arrangements of a polity. Among these, we
include the institutional mechanisms giving access to the state, the
modes of participation in civic life and public debates and the
legitimacy of specific types of claims-making.
The Responsibility Mix

Ideas about the role of the state in Europe under the influence of
Keynesianism macro-economic thinking followed from the prevailing
assumption that social spending “would complement the market
economy: it would be an instrument of automatic countercyclical
stabilization, it would ensure an educated and healthy workforce; and
it would provide the complex social infrastructure essential to an
urban economy” (Banting 1987, 185; also Goodin et al. 1999, 4ff.).
The family was assumed to be the major source of welfare, with the
income of the vast majority derived from employment, whether one’s
own or a family member’s. The community corner of the welfare
diamond was important because many social services were publicly
funded but actually provided by organizations in the third sector and
anchored in the community. For example, churches, non-profit associ-
ations, and unions organized hospitals, senior residences and schools,
providing many health and education services and often using public
funds. Sometimes the partnership was quite explicit, as in some of the

Bismarkian welfare regimes of continental Europe, where religious
institutions and unions organized and ran pension funds and provided
social services. Sometimes the partnership was very important but less
visible, as in some liberal welfare regimes where the growth of the
welfare state also involved the expansion of nonprofit agencies using
public funding to provide services of all kinds.
The developmentalist state in Latin America “was born out of the
same process that generated Keynesianism and welfare states” in

Europe (Draibe 2007, 241).17 However, whereas a variety of welfare
regimes were found in Europe after 1945, in Latin America one
regime type predominated: “ . . . from the mid-twentieth century on,
Latin American states, whether democratic or authoritarian, tended
to promote corporatist citizenship regimes. They extended social
rights (including subsidies, credit, health care, education, and the
like) and institutionalized corporatist modes of interest intermedia-
tion for workers and peasants, in particular” (Yashar 1999, 80).
The third sector played a role as well. Armando Barrientos
(2004) labels the traditional Latin American welfare mix
“conservative-informal,” indicating its reliance on social insurance
in formal policy design while in operation largely dependent on
informal arrangements.
The neoliberalism of the 1980s contested this responsibility mix.
While market outcomes were preferred, there was recognition of the
contribution of other parts of the diamond. State spending was criti-
cized while “community” involvement was celebrated. Communities
and organizations were called on to organize themselves to become
more business-like and to substitute for the state in service delivery.
This was often done in the name of community development (Schild
2000, 276 and passim; Meyer and Rankin 2002). As Roberts and
Portes (2006, 60–61) summarize the situation in the “free market
cities” of Latin America: “putting out services to NGOs enables
states to downsize their bureaucracies, . . . that leads many NGOs to
be open to state financing, but often at the expense of losing inde-
pendence and becoming administrators of state policies.”
Neoliberals popularized the diagnosis that social spending and
state intervention were in conflict with economic prosperity, and
thus the state was labeled the source of the problems of many
countries. Such ideas generated neoliberals’ vision of how to reba-
lance the welfare diamond. They downplayed the role of the state
and promoted “structural adjustments” that would make markets
the distributors of well-being, families responsible for their own
opportunities, and the community sector the final safety net.
454 V Jenson
Describing neoliberals’ position on social citizenship in Latin

America Dagnino (2005, 2) writes:
as a part of the neoliberal agenda of reform, citizenship began
to be understood and promoted as mere individual integration
to the market. At the same time and as part of the same
process of structural adjustments, consolidated rights are being
progressively withdrawn from workers throughout Latin
America. In a parallel development, philanthropic projects
from the so-called Third Sector have been expanding in

numbers and scope, in an attempt to address poverty and
exclusion . . .
Janet Newman et al. (2004, 204) use very similar words to describe
changes that occurred in European countries under neoliberalism: “ . . .
governments – in the UK, the USA and across much of Western
Europe – have attempted to shift the focus towards various forms of
co-production with other agencies and with citizens themselves
through partnerships, community involvement and strategies of
‘responsibilisation.’”
In the last decade there has been convergence around new ideas
about the welfare diamond for social citizenship. The social invest-
ment perspective does not reject the premise of either post-1945
welfare regimes or neoliberalism that the market ought to be the
primary source of well-being; it too emphasizes the importance of
paid employment and other forms of market income. But whereas
neoliberals assumed that market participation was the solution, the
social investment perspective includes a suspicion that the market
may not be producing sufficient employment income for everyone. A
common social investment prescription is the need to “make work
pay,” not simply by making it compulsory and competitive with
social benefit rates but also by supplementing wages, providing
low-cost services, or both.
This trust in markets gives discursive coherence to talk about
investments. The social investment perspective seeks to avoid
“spending,” but there is legitimacy for the idea of “investing.”
Individuals and their families are called upon “to invest in their own
human capital,” so as to succeed in the labor market. But the major
difference between the responsibility mix in the social investment
perspective and that of neoliberalism is that the state is assigned
some responsibility for ensuring that such investments are possible.
There is a basic recognition that opportunities are neither equally
nor equitably distributed. It may be necessary to provide services or
transfers to ensure that children can be sent to school, to pre-school,
or to the doctor, for example. Parents may not have the resources to
do so, and therefore they will not able to “choose” to invest in their
children.
Two examples illustrate how the justifications for redesign of the
welfare diamond are elaborated in terms of “investments” rather than
“spending.” One is early childhood education and care (ECEC). In
liberal and corporatist welfare regimes until very recently child care
remained firmly in the family sector of the welfare diamond, although
social democratic regimes provided public services in the name of
gender equality (Mahon 2006). In the last decade, however, and

across all regime types, putting public money into ECEC has become
the norm, justified as an investment in children’s futures. As the
OECD’s important publication Starting Strong II put it, “a central
issue for OECD governments in relation to early childhood funding is
not whether to invest, but how much and at what level” (OECD
2006, 20). It then goes on to say (OECD 2006, 37):
The move towards seeing early childhood services as a public
good has received much support in recent years from econom-
ists as well from education researchers [who] suggest that the
early childhood period provides an unequalled opportunity for
investment in human capital . . . A basic principle is that learn-
ing in one life stage begets learning in the next . . . . The rate of
return to a dollar of investment made while a person is young
is higher than the rate of return for the same dollar made at a
later age.
The Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean
makes virtually the same claim (ECLAC 2007, 117):
In order to promote greater educational equity in Latin
America, it is not enough to universalize primary education
(the second of the Millennium Development Goals); it is also
necessary to meet three further challenges concerning coverage
and continuity. The first is to assure universal access of children
aged between 3 and 6 to quality pre-school programmes which
can contribute to their general training and, as an indirect
effect, improve education outcomes at the primary level.
In both these quotes we also see the effects of new ideas about time
and about policy instruments. There is both a notion of investing
now for future returns and that interventions are to be judged by
their outcomes.
The instruments of “asset building” provide a second example of
the welfare diamond being redesigned. For Keynesians and neoliberals
alike, individual and family savings were a private matter.18 Now in
the social investment perspective, asset-building involves “public and
456 V Jenson
private strategies to enable low-income persons to save and accumu-

late long-term assets” (Boshara 2004, 1). Described explicitly as social
investments,19 the plans often target adult savers through micro-credit
programmes, but they are also popular as tools for promoting assets
of children and young people. In the United Kingdom since 2002 the
Child Trust Fund makes several payments into an account in the
child’s name (at birth and age 7), to be used when the child reaches
the age of majority.20 In Mexico, the Youngsters with Opportunities
programme (Jovenes con oportunidades—part of the general

Oportunidades programme) begun in 2002 provided endowment
grants to poor students who finish secondary school and go to univer-
sity (OECD 2003, 36ff).21 Such a focus on asset-building follows
directly from a social policy discourse constructed in terms of social
investments, locating pay-offs in the medium and long term.22
Policy communities’ converging ideas about both ECEC and
asset-building has led states to underwrite activities such as child
care and savings which for Keynesians as much as for neo-liberals
were private matters. Neoliberalism’s emphasis on individual and
family responsibility is muted in the social investment perspective,
but there is also care to avoid the so-called limits of early welfare
programmes, such as those that might have encouraged families to
choose full-time parental child care over labor market participation
or those that provided transfers for current consumption with no
attention to “building capacity.”
Rights and Duties of Citizenship

Ideas about the rights of social citizenship varied across welfare
regimes in the post-1945 decades, but one basic idea for many
welfare regimes was that access to citizenship rights depended on
one’s own or a family member’s relationship to the formal labor
market. As the Latin American welfare states were built in the 1940s
most of the peasant population was excluded from such citizenship
rights because they were not in the formal labor force (Draibe and
Reisco 2007, 42ff).23 In European corporatist welfare regimes access
to social rights depended on contributions to various social security
regimes. In liberal regimes many social benefits depended on the
relationship to the labor market, while a nonrelationship, either of
one’s own or a family breadwinner, opened access to the pro-
grammes of the social safety net.24 And, while social democratic
regimes provided more universal rights, the employment nexus of
social policy thinking was at the center of decommodification rights
(Esping-Andersen 1990).
As ideas drawn from neoliberalism assaulted the state—and there-
fore the citizenship—corner of the welfare diamond, redesign of
citizenship rights was the norm.25 Some existing social citizenship

rights were privatized.26 Perhaps the most draconian assaults were on
public pension systems in Latin America.27 But generous public pen-
sions were also a target of neoliberals in Europe.28 Ideas about social
solidarity also shifted as poverty and social exclusion were fore
grounded and attention to the rights of the so-called mainstream
faded. In Chile under the dictatorship for example (Schild 2000, 282):
The neo-liberal modernizations introduced a significant shift in
discourses of social policy. Accordingly, social spending was to

reach the truly needy and not ‘special interest groups’ such as
organized labour and organized middle-class professionals and
public servants. Thus, although social assistance spending was
not eliminated altogether, it became highly targeted to groups
deemed most vulnerable, the poorest sectors, and mothers with
infants.
Similar notions of a divided society, with social policy attention
focused on the margins and the risk of “social exclusion” were
increasingly popular not only in neoliberal Britain but also in France
and at the level of the European Commission (Jenson 1998).29
The social investment perspective approach to citizenship often
deploys ideas about social exclusion, including sometimes in line
with Amaryta Sen’s (2000) notion of capabilities.30 In the perspec-
tive in general there is a return of the language of social citizenship,
albeit not a return to post-1945 ideas. There is again willingness to
see the middle class as well as the poor as legitimate beneficiaries of
social policy, with an emphasis on universal programmes such as
ECEC and universal social benefits. In Latin America, ideas often
turn on ensuring better coverage for those left aside by traditional
social protection systems, particularly in the areas of health and pen-
sions (Cortés 2007, 10–11; appendices). For example, Mexico
City’s administration under the country’s largest left-wing party
since 1997 has worked on constructing a cross-class alliance
(Hilgers 2008, 134). In addition, the municipal government has
deployed many of the familiar tools of the social investment perspec-
tive, focused on children and human capital. In addition to subsidiz-
ing seniors’ nutrition and dramatically improving access to health
care for the uninsured, it has subsidized micro-credits for household
production, children’s school supplies, scholarships for children in
lone-parent families, breakfasts in public schools, compensation for
rising milk prices, and scholarships for job training (Laurell 2007, 4;
Hilgers 2008, 135). The justification for this targeting within a dis-
course of universal social citizenship is “well-being for all; first the
poor” (Laurell 2008, 146).
458 V Jenson
In Europe, concerns about the limits of social rights, particularly in

Bismarkian regimes, has led to various similar programmes to “plug
the holes.” France, for example, instituted a programme of “universal
health coverage” (Couverture maladie universelle) in 1999 as the gap
between citizens covered by employment-related regimes and those
outside them became too large to sustain (Palier 2002). Across the
European Union, high rates of precarious work and economic restruc-
turing have generated enthusiasm for “flexicurity” as a way of assur-
ing some measure of income stability even when job stability is a

thing of the past. The European Union, for example, incorporated the
principle of flexicurity in the updated 2008–10 Integrated Guidelines
for Growth and Jobs and launched a traveling Mission for Flexicurity
in 2008.31 Overall, there has been a revival of the idea that citizenship
involves social rights and not simply the duties and individual respon-
sibility stressed by neo-liberals.
Another way that the social investment perspective reconfigures
the rights dimension of a citizenship regime is by giving a “child
focus” to social rights (Jenson 2001; Esping-Andersen et al. chapter
2; Jenson and Saint-Martin 2003). One expression of these ideas
comes in the form of an emphasis on investments in human capital.
For example, the Mexican government describing its national social
development programme, Oportunidades, called for “investing in
human capital”: “Quality education means that educational achieve-
ments translate into real access to better opportunities to make use
of the benefits of that education. There will be payoffs from the
investment in the form of increases in the basic skills of poor
Mexican girls, boys and youth” (Secretarı́a de Desarrollo Social
2003, 65).
A second expression of this focus is through the addition of new
social programmes that target parents of young children, leaving
aside adults without dependent children. Argentina’s Plan Familias
has evolved from a classic neoliberal workfare programme for unem-
ployed heads of households (Plan Jefes y Jefas de Hogar
Desocupados) 32 to one focused on children and justified in the fam-
iliar language of social investment (Cortés 2007, 16). Then minister
of social affairs, Alicia Kirchner, presented the re-jigged Plan
Nacional de Familias por la inclusión social, which among other
things targets lone mothers, as one advancing opportunities for chil-
dren’s development. She also repeated the mantra of “not simply
passive assistance”: “This plan is a means to promote growth via
education; it generates future opportunities for both children and
mother’s access to the labour market.”33
In the OECD world, policy responses are frequently also
addressed to women with young children, such as expanded ECEC
services, parental leave, and tax packages to encourage women to

enter the labour force (OECD 2006, 21). In-work benefit pro-
grammes that provide incentives to low-income earners to enter and
stay in the labor force have increased rapidly in popularity over the
last decade.34 Several of them are “child-tested” as well as “work-
tested.”35 Examples are Britain’s Working Families Tax Credit
(instituted by New Labour in 1999). Even when supplements are
available to all adults, as is Britain’s Working Tax Credit (which
replaced the Working Families Tax Credit), children are factored

into calculating the benefits, with full benefits going only to families
with children.
The third expression of this redefinition of social citizenship
rights is found in what has become an international theme of “child
poverty.” Reducing child poverty has emerged as the major social
policy goal in many jurisdictions. Popularized by UNICEF (UNICEF
2000 for example), Britain’s New Labour government made fighting
child poverty a major theme (Dobrowolsky and Jenson 2005).
In similar ways, Ireland promised to reduce the number of children
in “consistent poverty” to below 2 percent of all children. Indeed, in
an analysis of the Joint Reports on Social Inclusion issued annually
by the European Commission and Council, “poverty in general has
been almost excised,” while child poverty has emerged as a “strong
issue” (Daly 2008, 10). One result is that fighting child poverty is
now a highlight of the European Union’s Renewed Social Agenda,
under both the heading “Children and Youth – Tomorrow’s
Europe” and “Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion” (European
Commission 2008, chapters 1 and 4).
In Latin America the poverty of families with children has been a
target in efforts to overcome the limits of corporatist welfare regimes
whose “truncated” design provided little coverage to much of the
population (Fiszbein 2004). Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are
the preferred policy instruments, which by 2008 were being used in
14 Latin American countries. All have a similar structure, being tar-
geted policies that are conditional both on means-testing and the
requirement to “undertake some pre-specified action” (Bastagli
2008, 127 and 137). Presented in the words of their promoters (de
la Brière and Rawlings 2006, 4):
They therefore hold promise for addressing the inter-

generational transmission of poverty and fostering social
inclusion by explicitly targeting the poor, focusing on children,
delivering transfers to women, and changing social accountabil-
ity relationships between beneficiaries, service providers and
governments. CCT programs are at the forefront of applying
460 V Jenson
new social policy theories and program administration prac-

tices. They address demand-side barriers, have a synergistic
focus on investments in health, education and nutrition, and
combine short-term transfers for income support with incen-
tives for long-run investments in human capital.
Promoted widely by the development policy community, major pro-

grammes have been adopted in a number of countries while smaller
pilots have been tried in others.36 Overall, they reflect recognition

that spending is necessary both to overcome current poverty and to
“break the intergenerational transmission of poverty” (Lindert et al.
2007, 6). They are widely classified among the “pro-poor” policies.
The best known and by far the largest CCT is Brazil’s Bolsa
Familia.37 Experimentation with allowances for poor families began
in the 1990s, but the programme was improved and consolidated by
the administration of President Lula da Silva. Within the framing of
social citizenship rights set out in the 1988 Constitution and by the
National Secretary of Social Assistance (created in 1995), in 2003
Lula combined four separate CCT allowances into a single cash
transfer funded by the central government and easily administered
by local authorities (Fenwick 2009, 109ff.). It combines conditional-
ities that make it available only to families with children and preg-
nant women and a portion that goes to anyone living in extreme
poverty (Bastagli 2008, 132–33). The conditional nature of these
programmes has provoked criticism among defenders of social citi-
zenship rights. It is important therefore to assess the ways these are
implemented. In a systematic comparison of CCT programmes in
Latin America, Bastagli (2008, 134) reports, for example: “In Brazil,
where the Bolsa Familia was launched in 2003, by 2007, out of a
total beneficiary population of 11.2 million households, one million
beneficiary households received a notification from the federal gov-
ernment for failure to comply to a conditionality and 11 households
were dropped from the programme for non-compliance that same
year.” While some CCT programmes, such as Chile’s, consume a
tiny amount of government spending, others, such as Brazil’s, rep-
resent a major spending commitment and receive positive evalu-
ations for their effect on lowering poverty and improving schooling
(Fenwick 2009, 114; Bastagli 2008, 134ff.).
We observe, therefore, that with respect to rights and duties, the
second dimension of the citizenship regime, there has also been a
convergence in policy goals across the two continents, towards
including the excluded. This goal has brought changes to social
citizenship rights. Labor regulations as well as new social pro-
grammes provide somewhat better coverage of rising service-sector
employment and the consequences of “informal” work. Reform has

also brought redesign of social policy programmes and instruments,
such as supplements to the earnings of the working poor whether
in the form of in-work benefits or CCTs. Often this convergence
has been justified in terms by a child-centered analysis, and in
particular the need to break the intergenerational transmission of
disadvantage.
Governance Arrangements and Citizenship Regimes

Most welfare regimes after 1945 and through the 1970s relied on
the ideas of the traditional Weberian state, organized around idea-
tional commitments to bureaucratic hierarchies and accountability
for public spending. As part of the construction of postwar welfare
regimes, power was centralized in the hand of the national govern-
ment, including in many federal systems. This centralization was jus-
tified in the name of nation-building, with the idea being that all
citizens would have access to equal services, no matter the resources
of their local community.
Embedded in neoliberal critiques of postwar welfare regimes were
arguments justifying not only the privatization of state services but
also their decentralization to another level of government.
Neoliberalism brought increasing enthusiasm for involvement in
governance by local governments and the “community,” via nongo-
vernmental organizations. This is as true in Latin America as in
Europe.38 In the six Latin American cities studied by Roberts and
Portes (2006, 61), “ . . . reform of the state emphasize[d] managerial,
technocratic competence, a trend that had begun in the 1970s and
1980s . . . .” Distrustful and often denigrating of “bureaucrats,” neo-
liberals argued that states should behave in more business-like ways
and learn how to manage as the private sector supposedly does.
They also put their trust in the “little state,” that is cities, municipal
authorities, and local groups. “The role of the state shifts from that
of ‘governing’ through direct forms of control (hierarchical govern-
ance), to that of ‘governance’, in which the state must collaborate
with a wide range of actors in networks that cut across the public,
private and voluntary sectors, and operate across different levels of
decision making” (Newman et al. 2004, 204).
Proponents of the social investment perspective do not completely
reject either neoliberal ideas about governance or the suspicion of
bureaucrats and “special interests.” Indeed, the very label “social
investment” serves to project the image of the more business-like,
market-friendly and dynamic entrepreneurial state as well as one
more responsive to local needs and concerns. As Tony Blair and
Gerhard Schröder put it in their 1999 Third Way manifesto:
462 V Jenson
“Modern social democrats solve problems where they can best be

solved. Some problems can now only be tackled at European level:
others, such as the recent financial crises, require increased inter-
national co-operation. But, as a general principle, power should be
devolved to the lowest possible level” (Blair and Schröder 1999; also
Giddens 1998 and ECLAC 2007, 119, 122, both of which empha-
size the advantages of decentralization).
New Labour’s post-1997 “modernization programme,” for
example, promised more space to local areas in order to achieve

community leadership, democratic renewal, and improved service
performance in relation to local needs. It promoted community con-
sultation and a “joined up” multi-agency partnership approach
towards meeting local needs (Lowndes and Wilson 2001, 635).
Indeed, such ideas about governance practices to engage local com-
munities and NGOs are found throughout the European Union and
its member states, as they reconfigure their citizenship regimes. Mike
Geddes terms this the “new orthodoxy of local partnerships” and
sees the instruments of governance arising directly from the social
analysis underpinning social investment (2000, 783–84):
local partnership reflects the perceived limits of both ‘statist’

forms of governance and some of the more extreme market-led
experiments of the 1980s, as ways of addressing the ‘govern-
ance crisis’ and the growing demand for more direct involve-
ment of citizens and ‘communities’ . . . .
But it is not only in Europe that the neoliberals’ enthusiasm for

empowering local authorities has been retained in the social invest-
ment perspective. In Latin America mobilization against both
authoritarianism and clientelism and for expanded citizenship has
tightly tied citizenship rights and political participation in political
mobilization for democratization (for an overview see Harbers
2007, 39f.). Not surprisingly, then, promises to improve citizenship,
local social services, and community participation have been tracked
across the region. Mexico City provides a case in point. Faced with
challenges to its neoliberal programmes, the federal government
finally accepted the establishment of democratic local institutions in
Mexico City in 1997 and the opposition left-wing party, the PRD,
immediately won power. The local government instituted both the
social reforms described above and new forms of governance.
Various institutional forms have been tried, and are too numerous to
overview here (for such an overview see Harbers 2007). One recent
effort illustrates one way decentralized governance (neighborhood
assemblies) and the programme for social rights have been linked:
When López Obrador took office, . . . he integrated these assem-

blies into his social program, the Programa Integrado
Territorial de Desarrollo Social (PIT) and centralized their
organization. There are two rounds of assemblies per year. In
the first round the program’s priorities for the coming year are
presented and citizens are provided with information about the
various sub-programs. The second round of assemblies takes
place at the end of the year and informs citizens how the
resources of the PIT have been allocated. Turnout for the

assemblies has ranged between less than 1 and just under 3
percent of registered voters (Harbers 2007, 50).
In addition to consultation, a goal of the integrated programme was

to weaken bureaucratic authority by instituting a new management
system (Laurell 2008, 146–47).
Patterns of access to political power have also altered with chan-
ging citizenship regimes. In post-1945 welfare regimes organized
interests and associations were acceptable, indeed valued parts of
the representational system, and this not only where corporatism
was the norm. With its critiques of “statism” and too much reliance
on the public sector for the provision of well-being, neoliberalism
assaulted existing relationships of representation. Unions were some-
times directly undermined, especially in Latin America as rights
were removed or weakened. Other times associational power was
subjected to a “double shift” of the focus both downward towards
the firm-level and upward toward the international.39 Neoliberals
mounted an assault on the identities of advocacy groups, labeling
them “special interests” and seeking to delegitimize their claims in
the eyes of the public (Jenson and Phillips 1996; Schild 2000, 282).
Neoliberals favored forms of representation that appeared to allow
“individuals” and not groups to seek representation. This vision has
consequences for the capacity of some movements and groups to
have their claims heard and certainly to achieve any positive results
for their demands (Alvarez 1999).
In contrast, the social investment perspective’s focus on “the
local” relies extensively on notions of consultation, communication
and community involvement, often with municipal authorities pro-
moted as the best representatives. This new enthusiasm for the local
level is often accompanied by enthusiasm for social capital, dis-
played both within agencies concerned with development and across
European governments and Union institutions. No matter the limits
of social capital as a concept,40 its use demonstrates an appreciation
of “the social” absent when neoliberals adhered to Margaret
Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no such thing as society.”41
464 V Jenson
Convergence Around Social Investment: Is Gender Awareness

Enough?
Part I has documented a convergence in Latin American and
European ideas about social citizenship, following from the adoption
and deployment of ideas about the social investment perspective. The
result is that all three dimensions of the citizenship regime are being
reconfigured. In this convergence, some policy instruments are quite
similar across the two regions, such as those promoting human
capital acquisition, programmes for asset-building and credit, part-

nerships with NGOs, and local and community-based delivery. The
common roots in ideas about modifying the supply-side of the labor
force are obvious. Other instruments are less similar. In-work
benefits to fight child poverty as well as services to support parental
employment have been preferred in Europe while Latin America has
innovated with CCTs that provide incentives to mothers to send their
children to school and for health check-ups. Despite these differences
in instrument choice, however, two policy objectives inform action
on both continents: using “investments” to break the intergenera-
tional transfer of poverty so as to improve future outcomes and
designing programmes to decrease social exclusion (especially non-
participation in the labor market), because of both the current and
long-term consequences of poverty for children.
There are several possible ways to assess this convergence. One
that is popular among male social policy experts and the develop-
ment community alike is that there is finally recognition of women’s
central contribution to the achievement of good societal outcomes.
For example, one of the best-known proponents of the social invest-
ment perspective, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, advocates a “new gender
contract” to underpin a new welfare state and support a child-
centered social investment strategy. He bases his policy stance on the
recognition that high rates of female labor force participation are
necessary for the sustainability of the new political economy
(Esping-Andersen et al. 2002, chapters 3 and 2). The desired high
participation rates will only be achieved, he argues, when appropri-
ately designed policies and programmes to provide social care (ident-
ified as day care; paid maternity—or even parental—leave; and time
to care for sick children) are in place. They will allow for “female
life course masculinisation.” He also expresses a hope, but is still
sceptical, that men will embrace “a more feminine life course”
(Esping-Andersen et al. 2002, 94–95).
This attention to women’s economic role emerged both from
national and international feminist organizing and from mobiliz-
ation within the international development community. With respect
to the latter, a policy focus on “women and development” took off

in the 1970s, as feminists moved into and struggled within organiz-
ations to force them to consider gender relations and their effects.
Over time agencies of the United Nations, other international organ-
izations, and NGOs came to recognize women’s economic contri-
butions as central to any successful development strategy. The 2000
Millennium Development Goals (MDG), for example, reflect this
focus on women’s contribution to development within a broader
social investment perspective focused on education and human

capital.42 Women are also key targets in the now very popular
micro-credit programmes, an example of an asset-building policy
instrument in the social investment perspective.
There is another assessment of this convergence around the social
investment perspective, however. Feminists are significantly more
sceptical that the social investment perspective, and particularly
its child and human capital foci, will have positive consequences
for their own agenda for achieving gender equality. Feminists’ assess-
ments of the MDG provide a good, albeit only one, example of this
scepticism (Murphy 2006, 249). For example, the third MDG goal is
to “promote gender equality and empower women,” a phrase that
sounds very much inspired by a feminist perspective. The actual
agreed target, however, is to “eliminate gender disparity in primary
and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of edu-
cation no later than 2015.”43 This focuses the goal on girls, with no
specific target for adult women. Without a target, attention can ebb
and flow.44 Without a target, the definition of “empowerment” itself
remains underspecified and indicators can alter with the times.45
Of course, the place where adult women are consistently present
is in the fifth MDG: to improve maternal health. The target is to
reduce the maternal mortality rate by three quarters between 1990
and 2015. While completely appropriate to target, because child-
birth remains potentially deadly and otherwise damaging to millions
of women, maternity is only one of their multiple social roles.
Increasingly, however, within the social investment perspective expli-
cit attention to adult women is overwhelmingly focused on mater-
nity, and particularly their contribution to demographic growth.
Gøsta Esping-Andersen (2002, 2008) provides an example of this
approach to gender relations from within a social investment perspec-
tive. The first of his three lessons about contemporary welfare states
deals with “families and the revolution in women’s roles” (2008). The
structure of the argument is straightforward. Post-industrial economies
and modern families depend on women’s employment. But women
are having fewer children. This has created a new challenge: finding a
balance between work and maternity. In his analysis, the most
466 V Jenson
important policy instrument available to achieve an appropriate

balance is nonparental child care. The defamilialization of care for
preschool children will allow women to successfully combine their
goals for a career and motherhood, and thereby avoid the demo-
graphic crisis facing Europe and the risks of family poverty that threa-
tens the well-being of children.
Yet, we know that not all policy designs have the same effects on
women’s opportunities and life course (for a recent overview see
Brighouse and Wright 2008). We can ask, therefore, whether the

social investment perspective can be embraced by feminists? Do
these ideas about social investment and social citizenship offer an
approach to gender relations that responds to women’s equality
claims and ambitions for full citizenship rights? Do they adequately
address the inequalities of gendered power relations?
A first step to assess the gendering consequences as well as the
equality potential of the social investment perspective is to note
what is absent. First, gone from the analysis are the structural
factors that cause women, their work and their achievements to be
devalued and undervalued with respect to men’s. Often in the social
investment perspective, cultural differences underpinning gender
roles, found around the globe, are to be worked around rather than
changed.46 For example, while expressing the hope there will be a
“feminisation” of male life-courses, Esping-Andersen argues for
more access to child care, for changes in working time and for some
attention to women’s “negotiation capacity” within the family.47
The latter he considers to depend on the fact that they too contrib-
ute income to the family (Esping-Andersen 2008, 49). He is sceptical
that men will assume care work responsibilities if it requires them to
take leave from paid employment. Therefore, he pays less attention
to parental leaves and more to maternity leaves, those taken by
mothers after the birth of a child. This relative silence about parental
leaves means that there is a virtual hush around one key dimension
of a more egalitarian family-work balance, which is care for children
in general. Family leaves and flexible parental leaves are instruments
for promoting shared parenting throughout childhood. Yet his
almost exclusive focus on maternity, because of the concern about
demography, leaves these very real issues aside.
Secondly, in discussing women’s careers and maternity, the analy-
sis does not even gesture in the direction of one of the most impor-
tant equality claims that feminists have made for decades—equal
pay. In his detailed calculations meant to convince economists and
policy-makers of the pay-offs of investments in nonparental child
care, he simply accepts the standard that women’s wages will be 67
percent of men’s (Esping-Andersen 2008, 39). This analysis, in other
words, displays no concern about gender equality in the workplace,

about structural discrimination or about the long-term consequences
of family care. Support for women’s capacity to balance work and
family is assessed purely in terms of an instrument’s potential for
achieving a better demographic balance.
Why does this matter? After all, Esping-Andersen is only one
policy intellectual among many. Why be concerned about the
absence of attention to long-standing feminist goals for gender
equality in his ideas about and prescriptions for social policy driven

by a social investment perspective? There would be little reason for
feminists to be concerned if his analysis were sui generis. It is,
however, quite representative of one of the possible consequences of
the social investment perspective on social policy analysis, which is
to write out attention to gender equality. And, he represents a way
of analyzing modern social policy dilemmas whose logic is increas-
ingly being accepted as modern dogma, not only in the European
Union but farther afield as well.48
Declining attention to equality of condition or even equal oppor-
tunities for women and men is a hallmark of the social investment
perspective. For example, in a recent publication promoting social
investment and addressed to one of the “laggard” Bismarkian politi-
cal economies, Jacques Delors and Michel Dollé instrumentalize
women’s employment and work-family balance issues in the name
of “investing in children.” They begin by describing women’s
employment and its importance first for demography and second as
a protection against the negative consequences of population ageing.
Women’s own goals for economic autonomy come a distant third,
while workplace discrimination merits only a short paragraph
(Delors and Dollé 2009, 195–98). Even more telling are the policy
proposals, which focus on better services, particularly for poor
families to be sure, and which provide a very useful corrective
against the—false and class-based—notion of “choice.” However,
the bottom line for these two major French policy intellectuals is
that once specific details are on the table for discussion the focus is
on “families” not on women, on child poverty and on child develop-
ment goals (Delors and Dollé 2009, 208–10). Silence envelopes
gender equality, even as one possible policy goal among several.
Another, and perhaps even more telling example can be drawn
from one of the countries often described as on the forefront of the
social investment perspective. Beginning in the 1960s Swedish
women’s movements and their allies advocated for high quality and
affordable child care services in the name of gender equality. They
also mobilized for well-designed parental leaves that would work a
profound shift in the gender division of labour (Mahon 2006). In
468 V Jenson
the “gender role debates,” the Swedish Social Democratic Party was
one of the main proponents of gender equality, and therefore of sig-
nificant change in gender relations at home as well as in women’s
role in society. Gradually over time, however, the two policy instru-
ments of child care and parental leaves have been developed and
promoted to serve other ends, while attention to gender relations
has been sidelined. In its 2006 election manifesto, for example, the
Social Democratic Party placed gender equality at the bottom of its
list of commitments, just before improving international affairs. In

sharp contrast, preschool education and children in general received
substantially more attention in the document, constituting one of the
six identified priorities—“the best of countries to grow up in” (SAP
2006, 3; see also 13 for the equality paragraph).
For Swedish policy intellectuals too, if support for dual-earner
model is a “best practice” Sweden can diffuse across the European
Union, it is because such families provide a response to the troubling
issue of intergenerational conflict and demography. Sweden is
described as having paid attention to the links between demography
and gender at least since the Myrdals’ writings in the 1930s, but the
vision of gender relations presented is an instrumental one: “Fertility
studies also indicate that the increased gender equity following from
dual-earner activity has positive effects on the propensity to have
children. Moreover, the available evidence does not seem to indicate
any systematic negative effects on educational performance of chil-
dren as a result of full time employment by their mothers” (Lindh,
Malmberg, and Palme 2005, 482, 479). Equity is the means to an
end, rather than the end in itself, as it is for feminists.
For these authors, just we saw for Delors and Dollé as well as
Esping-Andersen, higher rates of women’s labor force participation
are a collective good, and therefore adequate services for balancing
work and family are essential in modern, social investment welfare
regimes. Gone, however, is attention to several of the well-known
structural inequalities that have always concerned feminists. In the
Swedish labor force, for example, while the employment rate of
women is decidedly high, two of every five employed women work
part-time (whereas the rate for men is only 11 percent). Not surpris-
ingly, the negative pay gap between Swedish women and men is
higher than the average for the EU 27.49
Another example comes from the international organization
perhaps most involved in promoting the social investment perspec-
tive for modernizing welfare states (Dobrowolsky and Jenson 2005).
In its Babies and Bosses series, for example, the OECD’s analysis of
the work-family balance nexus was originally driven by several con-
cerns: declining fertility, poverty, and—in an earlier formulation—
gender pay gaps.50 By the time of the synthesis report in 2007,

however, the analysis had been pared down to demographic and
labor supply questions, framed in a classic social investment perspec-
tive as concern with employment for all and the future of society:
If parents cannot achieve their desired work/family life
balance, not only is their welfare lower but economic develop-
ment is also curtailed through reduced labour supply by
parents. A reduction of birth rates has obvious implications for
future labour supply as well as for the financial sustainability

of social protection systems. As parenting is also crucial to
child development, and thus the shape of future societies,
policy makers have many reasons to want to help parents find
a better work/family balance.51
While the report itself includes recommendations about gender
equity, the focus is on sharing leave time (via paternity leaves) rather
than on equality per se. Attention to such sharing, just as access to
ECEC services, is to be lauded. It does not, however, represent the
equality agenda of much of second-wave feminism. It reflects instead
the crowding-out effect that follows when the focus shifts to chil-
dren, human capital development and often social capital.52
This writing out of gender equality goals and the needs of adult
women has been analyzed by feminist scholars. With respect to
several of the CCT and other new social programmes, Maxine
Molyneux makes an important distinction between “gender aware-
ness” and attention to gender inequalities and programmes that
promote equality. Her conceptual distinction is worth quoting at
length, because the structure of gender awareness in this Mexican
programme is very similar to that displayed in the social investment
perspective in general:
It is clear that the design of the programme shows evidence of
gender-awareness: gender is not only incorporated into, but is
central to the management and design of, Oportunidades.
There are four main aspects to this gender sensitivity: first, the
programme was one of the earliest in Latin America to give the
financial transfers (and principal responsibilities associated
with them) to the female head of participating households;
second, the transfers associated with children’s school attend-
ance involved an element of affirmative action: stipends were
10 per cent higher for girls than for boys at the onset of sec-
ondary school which is when the risk of female drop-out is
highest; and third, the programme’s health-care benefits for
children were supplemented by a scheme which monitors the
470 V Jenson
health of, and provides support for, pregnant and breastfeeding

mothers and children under 2 years of age. The fourth aspect
of the project design which displays gender sensitivity is the
goal to promote the leadership and citizenship of the women
subscribed. These goals are, however, inconsistent: they rep-
resent a combination of equality measures (for the girls) and
maternalist measures (for their mothers).
The logic of the design was quite similar to what we have seen for

the MDG targets—equality for girls and protection for maternity.
There is very little in the programme design that targets women’s
need and hopes for economic autonomy or security. “Training for
the job market is limited or non-existent, despite this being a fre-
quent request by beneficiaries, and there is scant, if any, childcare
provision for those women who want or need it because they work,
train or study” (Molyneux 2006, 439).
Nor is the much that inspires hope there will be the effects, so
important to Esping-Andersen’s version of the social investment per-
spective, on women’s “negotiation capacity” within the family by
providing women with some outside income. Assessments of the
Mexican programmes find little evidence of any positive effect on
power relations within the family (Molyneux 2006, 437). Indeed,
given other analyses which assess male appropriation of women’s
wages, there is little reason to believe that having both parents earn
some income is sufficient to alter the long-standing patterns of
gender power.
A large literature, both economic and ethnographic, examining
these patterns of “non” negotiation in many societies is available
(reviewed in detail in Chant 2003, 17ff). It documents the ways in
which women’s wages are appropriated by men. This literature
stands in sharp contrast to the one study about spending on clothing
(women and children’s versus men’s) that occurred when the United
Kingdom instituted a child benefit paid to mothers (Lundberg,
Pollak, and Wales 1997), the study that provided the empirical foun-
dation for Esping-Andersen’s conclusion that women’s negotiating
capacity improves when some, even minimal, income is available
directly to them (2008, 35). This far-reaching conclusion has been
explicitly contradicted, moreover, both by a direct comparator study
(Hotchkiss 2006)53 and by the long-standing feminist concerns
about and empirical attention to inequalities in the intra-familial dis-
tribution of income (Chant 2003, 20).
Overall, several assessments of the instruments as well as the
principles of the social investment perspective signal a return of
naturalized notions of the mother–child nexus, both because of the
concern about demography and because of the way the interge-

nerational transmission of poverty is sometimes analyzed.
Molyneux points to the return of the notion of “bad mothers”
that underpins the design of incentives in CCTs. Women who fail
to meet the requirements both lose their benefits and are stigma-
tized as failing to perform their maternal duty (2006, 438). A
similar emphasis on improving parenting practices of poor women,
often lone-parents, is found in several versions of the social invest-
ment perspective in liberal welfare regimes. New Labour’s Sure

Start initiative, for example, focused on training for parenting as
well as employability measures and services for children, the
notion being that parents in poor neighborhoods and living in low-
income needed instruction in how to parent (Dobrowolsky and
Jenson 2005, 218).54
This emphasis on “parenting”—which most often means
mothering—is part of the reassertion of woman-maternity connec-
tion within the social investment perspective and the writing out of
the gender equality goals that finally come to underpin post-1960
social policy as a result of feminist mobilizations at the national and
international levels. This means there has been a shrinking political
space for women to make claims for full citizenship, especially a
social citizenship founded on equality between adult women and
men.
Concluding remarks
The social investment perspective is spreading. Visible in liberal
and social democratic welfare regimes in Europe in the mid-1990s, it
is being promoted and gaining visibility in Bismarckian regimes. The
politics of welfare regimes is converging around a package of ideas
about modernization, social inclusion, and social investment. They
rework and recombine policy positions of both post-1945 social pro-
tection systems and those of neoliberalism. A similar dynamic exists
in several Latin America. In several countries the transition to
democracy brought not only reformed political institutions but also
other ways of analyzing social inequalities and new instruments for
breaking the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage. An
emphasis on generational and intergenerational analysis as well as
enthusiasm for ensuring investments in human and social capital has
brought the needs of children and youth to the fore in policy dis-
course in a more dramatic way than when the ideas of Keynesianism
or neo-liberals held sway.
These policy ideas within the social investment perspective are
all infused with concerns about women and their circumstances. If
472 V Jenson
the policies of the Keynesian era appeared blind to their own gen-
dering effects and neo-liberals abandoned notions of any collective
responsibility for equality and therefore were essentially uncon-
cerned about gendered inequalities, gender awareness is at the very
heart of the social investment perspective. Women’s economic con-
tributions as well as their care work are on the agenda, and refor-
mers propose ways to promote women’s capacity to balance work
and family.
At first blush, this gender awareness seems to represent a victory

for decades of feminist mobilization and analysis. Closer attention
reveals, however, that something has been lost in the translation of
egalitarian feminism into the gender awareness that infuses the
social investment perspective. Long ago we learned that women
could be the object of public policy, and even a certain public gener-
osity, without them being incorporated on equal terms into social
and political citizenship. In the first half of the twentieth century,
mothers’ pensions and family allowances paid to mothers rather
than fathers provided a classic example of gender awareness that
never translated into gender equality. For much of the twentieth
century, at least until the assaults of neoliberalism took hold, the
state substituted for the breadwinner so as to ensure a minimum
income to widowed, “abandoned” or lone mothers and their chil-
dren, whether in the form of generous family allowances or less gen-
erous social assistance transfers. In the first decades of the
twenty-first century gender awareness prompts other types of policy
interventions, but now as before it has only the weakest of commit-
ments to equalizing relations between women and men by challen-
ging power relations.
There is another lesson as well. It is that gender awareness can
take the form of appropriation of some of the policy instruments for
which feminists have struggled for decades in their search for equal-
ity, without necessarily producing “strong gender egalitarianism”
(Brighouse and Wright 2008). Their translation into instruments to
serve the social investment perspective has resulted both in writing
out the equality claims of adult women in favor of those of girls,
and a reassertion of the hegemony of the mother–child linkage
which feminists for decades have sought to treat as only one dimen-
sion in the complex of gender relations within which women and
men live. The lesson is clear: feminists, both women and men,
cannot be seduced by the gender awareness of the social investment
perspective into thinking that, without corrective interventions on
their part, it will either represent or generate an accurate translation
of their claims for gender equality.
NOTES
Département de science politique, Université de Montréal, Montréal,
Canada. Email: jane.jenson@umontreal.ca.
1. Hemerijck (2007) recounts the emergence and consolidation the idea
of the European “developmental welfare state,” as depending in large part
on a “child-centred social investment strategy” and a “human capital
investment push” (Hemerijck 2007, 12 –13).
2. The definition of convergence adopted here is that of Knill (2005,
768), who writes: “ . . . policy convergence can be defined as any increase in
the similarity between one or more characteristics of a certain policy (e.g.

policy objectives, policy instruments, policy settings) across a given set of
political jurisdictions (supranational institutions, states, regions, local auth-
orities) over a given period of time. Policy convergence thus describes the
end result of a process of policy change over time towards some common
point, regardless of the causal processes.” The focus in this article is only
on policy objectives, because as argued here, instruments and settings con-
tinue to vary widely across jurisdictions.
3. Draibe and Reisco (2007) make the case that it is now possible to
analyze Latin America alongside other welfare regimes, recognizing of
course the differences in developmental trajectories.
4. As the literatures on “welfare regimes,” “families of nations,” and so
on clearly teach us, there were obviously differences across jurisdictions in
the specific policies as well as in their ideological foundations and political
support.
5. The institutions of the European Union have only recently, for
example, begun to deploy the language of social investment (Jenson 2007,
2008). Bismarckian regimes have also been slow to do so, although there is
now a move to push them that direction (Delors and Dollé 2009 for
example). Trudie Knijn (this volume) documents other approaches to mod-
ernizing social policy circulating in Europe that she considers to be alterna-
tives to the social investment perspective.
6. No claim is being made that this perspective is particularly pro-
gressive. Assessment of the social investment perspective according to its
consequences for a fair and just distribution of wealth or for the pro-
motion of equality is a task for another article. The one undertaken
here is to describe the perspective and its consequences for social citizen-
ship, the notion being that it is always helpful to know what is really
going on.
7. For example in their recent manifesto, Jacques Delors and Michel
Dollé begin their argument for moving beyond the traditional welfare state
by unpacking the norm of “Monsieur Gagnepain et Madame Aufoyer”
[Mr. Breadwinner and Mrs. Housewife] (2009, 15 and passim).
8. For just one example among many: “Historically, reproduction has
been an essential part of the lives of both women and men, with women
taking a disproportionate share of the responsibility. Denying the effect of
social arrangements on reproduction, therefore, would be tantamount to
declaring that activities that for centuries have dominated the lives of
474 V Jenson
women have not been part of political and economic development” (Lindh,
Malmberg, and Palme 2005, 480).
9. See for example the campaign of the European Union against the
gender gap, analyzed not only in terms of earnings but also discrimination,
segregation, and reliance on policies such as the promotion of part-time
employment. http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId¼681&langId¼en,
consulted 3 July 2009.
10. There is now a vast literature on how ideas matter. For a useful
overview, see Campbell (2004) as well as Béland (this volume) and
Padamsee (this volume).

11. Left aside here is the large debate about the role of “culture” in
shaping social policy. This matter is addressed explicitly in Stryker and
Wald (this volume).
12. This analytical position clearly stands on a rejection of the so-called
“discursive institutionalism” that provides an impoverished vision of the
role of “ideas.” In a wrong-headed insistence on separating “ideas” from
interests—an impossible task as historical institutionalism makes clear—
promoters of “discursive institutionalism” foreground “ideational vari-
ables” that “just as any other factor, sometimes matters, sometimes does
not matter in the explanation of policy change” (Schmidt and Radaelli
2004, 184). The ontological position of the version of historical institution-
alism employed here is that ideas “always matter.”
13. O’Connor, Orloff, and Shaver (1999, 53) describe the Hayekian
underpinnings of neoliberalism’s acceptance of safety nets as legitimately
providing “a minimum level of adequacy.”
14. Decreto Supremo No 029-2007-PCM, 30 March 2007. A law
reforming all social programmes in Peru.
15. For the development of this concept see Jenson and Phillips (1996)
and Jenson and Saint-Martin (2003) as well as Yashar (1999, 2005) who
applies it to Latin America.
16. The metaphor of the welfare diamond underpins the responsibility
mix. It disaggregates the three “welfare pillars” described by those employ-
ing the concept of welfare regime (for example, Esping-Andersen 1999).
Where the three pillars of welfare regimes are state, market, and family, we
suggest that it is important to consider four sources of well-being.
Distinguishing the community sector from both the family and the market
provides a better handle on processes of shifting responsibilities and govern-
ance. For a similar diamond see Evers, Marja, and Clare (1994).
17. Cortés (2007, 4ff.) provides, however, a useful reminder that there
has been a tendency, at least with respect to the Argentine “golden age,” to
exaggerate the generosity and functionality of the post-1945 social protec-
tion regime. The same warning about “nostalgia” can easily be made with
respect to Europe, of course.
18. One major exception was, however, the United States’ massive
support for asset accumulation via tax breaks for home ownership.
19. The OECD (2003, 17) makes the case for these instruments being
social investments in this way: “In a publicly funded asset-building scheme,
the funds that match household savings or constitute the endowments of a

“baby bond” programme really are not government current expenditures.
They are savings, just like those of the households they benefit. Forget how
government budgets may treat them; in the national economic accounts, they
ought to be counted as “government saving”, which is to say “government
investment”. In effect and under the rules of the schemes, governments trans-
fer to households a portion of current revenues as a claim on human or phys-
ical capital. This forms the foundation for the idea of social investment.
Following the reasoning above, it ought to be possible to simulate ex ante
and to measure ex post social investment’s net return over time, in terms of

both economic growth and reduced income transfers because (if the argu-
ments for Asset Building are correct) fewer people would live in poverty.”
20. See http://www.childtrustfund.gov.uk.
21. See http://www.oportunidades.gob.mx/jovenes/jovenes.html.
22. The case for asset-building as a new welfare policy approach, in
comparison to the outdated models, is made in OECD (2003, Chapter 1).
23. Brazil was quite typical, with its “ . . . relatively wide and systematic
recognition of social rights by the state in Brazilian history, . . . such recog-
nition did not have a universal character but was restricted to workers”
(Dagnino 2005, 6).
24. In liberal regimes such as the United Kingdom and Canada, health
care was a large exception to this generalization.
25. Francis Castles’ detailed quantitative data analysis of the original
OECD countries documents that this was more redesign than cutbacks.
Spending levels were stable, but there were clear shifts in composition of
spending. Cash transfers declined relative to services (Castles 2005, 414 –
19). In Latin America, in the late 1980s state spending did decline signifi-
cantly, but then it rose again (Draibe and Reisco 2007, 48; 104– 9).
26. The severity of cuts and redesign depended in part on the timing of
the reform. Chile as the “innovator” provided the most “radical example of
the Neoliberal market model,” while Brazil used more universal principles
for policy design (Draibe and Reisco 2007, 52; and 51 – 55).
27. Beginning with Chile under Pinochet in 1981, seven Latin American
countries subsequently privatized their public pension systems, moving
towards individual capitalization designs in order to completely replace the
public system, establish a parallel system or set up a mixed system (Madrid
2002, 159 – 60).
28. The literature on European pensions is enormous. For some com-
parative work see Bonoli and Shinkawa (2005).
29. This is a discourse that “presents ‘society’ as experiencing a rising
standard of living by defining those who have not done so, who have become
poorer, as ‘excluded from’ society, as ‘outside’ it” (Levitas 1996, 7).
30. The link between Amartya Sen’s ideas about “capabilities” and the
social investment perspective is strong. See, for example, ECLAC (2007)
(which has a chapter entitled “Opportunities, capabilities and protection”),
the World Development Report 2007 (which has a chapter entitled
“Opportunities, capabilities, second chances”), the IDB (2008, 5), which
476 V Jenson
describes its analysis of social exclusion as “following Sen”), and the

European Union which used the language of capabilities in its “stocktak-
ing” process in 2007 (European Commission 2007) that led to the
Renewed Social Agenda in July 2008. See also Porter and Craig (2004,
392) and Delors and Dollé (2009, 9 and passim).
31. See http://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/employment_strategy/
flex_mission_en.htm, consulted 4 August 2008.
32. It covered two million households who were unemployed and poor.
Work (usually part-time) had to be accepted and there were conditions for
vaccination of children and schooling (Barbeito and Goldberg 2007, 200).

33. See the remarks of the minister of social affairs on http://www.
presidencia.gov.ar/Articulo.aspx?cdArticulo=4702. Consulted 1 February
2008.
34. By 2003 eight of the EU15 had an introduced an in-work benefit
(Immervoll et al. 2007, 35). Sweden introduced one in 2007.
35. Because they are work-tested, such benefits are quite different in
logic from family allowances, which are child-tested—that is there must be
an eligible child in the family—and which may be income-tested. In-work
supplements are just that; they top up employment income.
36. Unless otherwise indicated, information is from Soares et al. (2007).
37. Created in 2003 to rationalize a number of existing CCT’s that had
been focused on reducing child labor, increasing school attendance, pro-
moting pre-natal care, and so on, the Bolsa Familia is conditional on
school attendance and medical visits, what are termed “human capital
requirements” (Lindert et al. 2007, 6).
38. On Latin America, for the neoliberal period see Yashar (1999, 86).
For the continuation of this decentralization see Marques-Pereira (2007).
On Europe see Geddes (2000).
39. Etchemendy and Collier (2007, 392 – 93 and passim) survey Latin
America; Martin and Ross (1999, 8ff and passim) consider the “double
shift” and the European situation.
40. For one reflective overview of the now vast literature on the idea of
social capital see Schuller (2007).
41. From a 1987 interview, housed on the site of the Margaret Thatcher
Foundation, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument
.asp?docid¼106689, consulted 5 August 2008.
42. Craig Murphy writes of this shift, represented by the Millennium
Development Goals (MDG) proclaimed in 2000, this way: “By adopting
them, many powerful institutions – both governmental and intergovern-
mental – have come to embrace an egalitarian, human-centred view of
development that was not common-place in the 1970s. Moreover, these
institutions have accepted the central role of women, and of their empower-
ment, in any attempt to achieve the society-wide development goals . . . ”
(Murphy 2006, 210 –11).
43. See http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/, consulted 3 July 2009.
44. Women’s employment and parliamentary representation are some-
times included in annual assessments of progress, although as a secondary
factor. For example in the 2008 Millennium Development Goals Report

(http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Default.aspx, consulted 3 July 2009, much
more attention is devoted to assessing progress on the education targets
than on possible measures of adult women’s empowerment.
45. While earlier reports stayed on the terrain of national decision-
making, decision-making in refugee camps appeared in the 2008 report.
46. Delors and Dollé (2009, 198), for example, link discrimination and
“cultural behaviour being as it is” as the primary reason for discrimination
in the workplace. Employers treat all women as potential mothers, and
therefore prefer to invest their training and salary resources in men.

47. This lack of attention to the design details of parental and family
leaves is in sharp contrast to the argument for “strong gender egalitarian-
ism” by Brighouse and Wright (2008), who argue that only leave entitle-
ments to individuals (that is nontransferable paternity leaves) have real
equality-promoting effects.
48. The claim is not that Esping-Andersen invented this analytic logic.
Indeed, all of its components were already in place in this 1997 analysis by
OECD researchers: “Today’s labour-market, social, macro-economic and
demographic realities look starkly different from those prevailing when the
welfare state was constructed . . . . Social expenditure must move towards
underwriting social investment, helping recipients to get re-established in
the labour market and society, instead of merely ensuring that failure to do
so does not result in destitution.” (Pearson and Scherer 1997, 6; 9).
Children were the focus of the article.
49. For the 2007 figures see: http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=
685&langId=en&intPageId=169, consulted 3 July 2009.
50. See the 2004 presentation of the three country study (New Zealand,
Portugal and Switzerland) at http://www.oecd.org/document/13/0,3343,
en_2649_34819_33844621_1_1_1_1,00.html.
51. This quote is from the presentation of the synthesis report on http://
www.oecd.org/document/45/0,3343,en_2649_34819_39651501_1_1_1_1,
00.html.
52. The European Union’s social policy perspectives associated with the
mid-term review of the Lisbon Strategy provide other examples of this
writing-out of attention to gender relations and even women (Jenson
2008). The effect has also been observed in the Canadian case
(Dobrowolsky and Jenson 2004). Molyneux (2002) provides a detailed
assessment of the ways the move towards a discourse of social capital
resulted in the writing-out of gender, as well as analytic conflict between
feminists and others in the development community.
53. Lundberg, Pollak, and Wales’ study (1997), which concludes
that paying Britain’s Child Benefit to mothers accounts for changes in
behaviour—in this case increased spending on women and children’s
clothing—is directly undermined by Hotchkiss’ analysis (2006), which
found a secular increase in spending on women’s clothing over the same
years. She examined childless couples (therefore nonrecipients of the Child
Benefit) and observed a similar shift in expenditure patterns to favor
478 V Jenson
spending on women’s clothing. This finding puts the validity of the analysis
by Lundberg, Pollak, and Wales into serious doubt.
54. This notion that the poor suffer from a lack of parenting skills is
deeply embedded in social policy traditions, both those that eventually
became liberal welfare regimes (Jenson 1986) and social democratic and
corporatist ones. Nonparental child care in France, Sweden, and Canada,
among others, in the 1940s and 1950s targeted poor children, as experts
argued they would benefit from less time spent with their parents and more
with trained early childhood educators and health workers (Jenson and
Sineau 2001, 245 – 46).

REFERENCES
Alvarez, Sonya. 1999. “Advocating Feminism: The Latin American
Feminist NGO ‘Boom’.” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 1
(2): 181 –209.
Banting, Keith. 1987. (2nd ed.). The Welfare State and Canadian
Federalism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Barbeito, Alberto C., and Laura Goldberg. 2007. “Social Policy and
Economic Regime in Argentina: Crisis and Retrenchment in Social
Protection.” In Latin America. A New Developmental Welfare State
Model in the Making, ed. Manuel Riesco, 187 – 216. Houndsmill,
Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Barrientos, Armando. 2004. “Latin America: towards a Liberal-informal
Welfare Regime.” In Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and
Latin America, eds. Ian Gough, and Geof Wood. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 121– 68.
Bastagli, Francesca. 2008. “Conditionality in Public Policy Targeted to the
Poor: Promoting Resilience.” Social Policy and Society, 8 (1): 127 –40.
Blair, Tony, and Gerhard Schroeder. 1999. Europe: The Third Way. http://
www.socialdemocrats.org/blairandschroeder6-8-99.html. (accessed
August 14, 2007).
Bonoli, Guiliano and Toshimitsu Shinkawa, eds. 2005. Ageing and Pension
Reform around the World: Evidence from Eleven Countries.
Cheltenham Glos: Edward Elgar.
Boshara, Ray. 2004. OECD Forum on Mexico: Policies to Promote
Growth and Economic Development. Presentation, 3 November. http://
www.oecd.org/document/42/0,3343,fr_2649_37457_33873642_1_1_
1_37457,00.html. (accessed July 3, 2007).
Brighouse, Harry, and Erik Olin Wright. 2008. “Strong Egalitarianism.”
Politics and Society, 36 (3): 360 –72.
Campbell, John L. 2004. Institutional Change and Globalization.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Castles, Francis. 2005. “Social Expenditures in the 1990s: Data and
Determinants.” Policy & Politics, 33 (3): 411 – 30.
Chant, Sylvia. 2003. The ‘Engendering’ of Poverty Analysis in Developing
Regions: Progress since the United Nations Decade for Women, and
Priorities for the Future. London: LSE Research Online. http://eprints

.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000573. (accessed July 3, 2009).
Cortés, Rosalı́a. 2007. “Social Policy in the post-Washington Consensus
Era: The Role of International Organizations in Social Policy in
Argentina and Brazil.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of RC 19,
Florence, September.
Dagnino, Evelina. 2005. Meanings of Citizenship in Latin America. IDS
Working Paper # 258.
Daly, Mary. 2008. “Whither EU Social Policy? An Account and
Assessment of Developments in the Lisbon Social Inclusion Process.”

Journal of Social Policy, 37 (1): 1 –19.
De la Brière, Bénédicte, and Laura B. Rawlings. 2006. Examining
Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: A Role for Increased Social
Inclusion? Social Safety Net Primer Series, SP Discussion Paper #0603.
Washington, D.C.: World Bank.
Delors, Jacques. 2003. “Préface.” In La troisième voie. Le renouveau de la
social-democratie, eds. Tony Blair, and Anthony Giddens, 7 – 16. Paris:
Seuil.
Delors, Jacques, and Michel Dollé. 2009. Investir dans le social. Paris: Odile
Jacob.
Dobrowolsky, Alexanadra, and Jane Jenson. 2004. “Shifting
Representations of Citizenship: Canadian Politics of ‘Women’ and
‘Children’.” Social Politics. International Studies in Gender, State and
Society, 11 (2): 154 – 80.
————. 2005. “Social Investment Perspectives and Practices: a
Decade in British politics.” In Social Policy Review #17, ed. Martin
Powell, Linda Bauld, and Karen Clarke, 203 –30. Bristol, UK: The
Policy Press.
Draibe, Sonia M. 2007. “The Brazilian Developmental Welfare State. Rise,
Decline and Perspectives.” In Latin America. A New Developmental
Welfare State Model in the Making, ed. Manuel Riesco, 239– 81.
Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Draibe, Sonia M., and Manuel Riesco. 2007. “Latin America: A New
Developmental Welfare State in the Making?” In Latin America. A New
Developmental Welfare State Model in the Making, ed. Manuel Riesco,
21 – 115. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean).
2007. Social Cohesion: Inclusion and a Sense of Belonging in Latin
America and the Caribbean. New York: United Nations.
Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 1999. Social Foundations of Industrial
Economies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Esping-Andersen, Gøsta, Duncan Gallie, Anton Hemerijck, and John
Myles. 2002. Why We Need a New Welfare State. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Esping-Andersen, Gøsta, with Bruno Palier. 2008. Trois Leçons sur
l’État-providence. Paris: Seuil.
480 V Jenson
Etchemendy, Sebastián, and Ruth Berins Collier. 2007. “Down but Not
Out: Union Resurgence and Segmented Neocorporatism in Argentina
(2003 – 2007).” Politics and Society, 35 (3): 363– 401.
European Commission. 2007. Opportunities, Access and Solidarity:
Towards a New Social Vision for 21st Century Europe. COM (2007)
796 final.
————. 2008. Renewed Social Agenda: Opportunities, Access and
Solidarity in 21st Century Europe. COM (2008) 412 final.
Evers, Adalbert, Marja Pilj, and Clare Ungerson, eds. 1994. Payments for
Care. Aldershot, UK: Avebury.

Fenwick, Tracy Beck. 2009. “Avoiding Governors. The Success of Bolsa
Famı́la.” Latin American Research Review 44 (1): 102 –31.
Geddes, Mike. 2000. “Tackling social exclusion in the European Union?
The Limits to the New Orthodoxy of Local Partnerships.” International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24 (4): 782– 800.
Giddens, Anthony. 1998. The Third Way. The Renewal of Social
Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Goodin, Robert, Bruce Headey, Ruud Muffels, and Henk-Jan Dirven.
1999. The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Harbers, Imke. 2007. “Democratic Deepening in Third Wave Democracies:
Experiments with Participation in Mexico City.” Political Studies 55 (1):
38 – 58.
Hemerijck, Anton. 2007. “Joining Forces for Social Europe. Reasserting
the Lisbon Imperative of ‘Double Engagement’ and More.” Lecture
to the Conference “Joining Forces for a Social Europe”, organized under
the German Presidency of the European Union, Nuremburg, 8– 9
February 2007.
Hernes, Helga Maria. 1988. “The Welfare State Citizenship of
Scandinavian Women.” In The Political Interests of Gender. Developing
Theory and Research with a Feminist Face, ed. Kathleen B. Jones, and
Anna G. Jónasdóttir, 187 –213. London: Sage.
Hilgers, Tina. 2008. “Causes and Consequences of Political Clientelism:
Mexico’s PRD in Comparative Perspective.” Latin American Politics
and Society, 50 (4): 123 –53.
Hotchkiss, Julie. 2006. “Do Husbands and Wives Pool Their Resources?
Further Evidence.” Journal of Human Resources, XL (2): 519 –31.
Immervoll, Herwig, Henrik Jacobsen Kleven, Claus Thustrup Kreiner, and
Emmanuel Saez. 2007. “Welfare Reform in European Countries:
A Microsimulation Analysis.” The Economic Journal, 117 (January):
1– 44.
Jenson, Jane. 1986. “Gender and Reproduction: Or, Babies and the State.”
Studies in Political Economy, 20: 9– 46.
————. 1989. “Paradigms and Political Discourse: Protective Legislation
in France and the United States before 1914.” Canadian Journal of
Political Science, XXII (2): 235 –58.
————. 1990. “Representations in Crisis: The Roots of Canada’s

Permeable Fordism.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, XXIII (4):
653 –83.
————. 1998. Mapping Social Cohesion. The State of Canadian
Research. Ottawa: CPRN. Available at: www.cccg.umontreal.ca.
————. 2001. “Re-Thinking Equality and Equity: Canadian Children
and the Social Union.” In Democratic Equality: What Went Wrong? ed.
Ed Broadbent, 111 – 29. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
————. 2007. “Social Investment for New Social Risks: Consequences of
the LEGOTM Paradigm for Children.” In Children, Changing Families

and Welfare States, ed. Jane Lewis, 27 –50. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
————. 2008. “Writing Women Out, Folding Gender In. The European
Union ‘Modernises’ Social Policy.” Social Politics. International Studies
in Gender, State and Society, 15 (2): 1 –23.
————. forthcoming 2010. “Diffusing Ideas for after-neoliberalism: The
social investment perspective in Europe and Latin America.” Global
Social Policy.
Jenson, Jane, and Susan D. Phillips. 1996. “Regime Shift: New Citizenship
Practices in Canada.” International Journal of Canadian Studies, 14
(Fall): 111– 36.
Jenson, Jane, and Denis Saint-Martin. 2003. “New Routes to Social
Cohesion? Citizenship and the Social Investment State.” Canadian
Journal of Sociology, 28 (1): 77 – 99.
————. 2006. “Building Blocks for a New Social Architecture: the LEGOTM
Paradigm of an Active Society.” Policy & Politics, 34 (3): 429–51.
Jenson, Jane, and Mariette Sineau, eds. 2001. Who Cares? Women’s Work,
Childcare and Welfare State Redesign. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.
Knill, Christoph. 2005. “Introduction: Cross-national Policy Convergence:
Concepts, Approaches and Explanatory Factors.” Journal of European
Public Policy, 12 (5): 764– 74.
Laurell, A. S. [Asa Cristina]. 2007. Getting Universal Access to Health Care:
The Experience of the Mexico City Government. Paper prepared for the
Health Systems Knowledge Network, WHO Commission on the Social
Determinants of Health. http://www.who.int/social_determinants/
resources/csdh_media/mexico_universal_access_2007_en.pdf, (accessed
July 3, 2009).
Laurell, A. S. [Asa Cristina]. 2008. “Health Reform in Mexico City, 2000 –
2006.” Social Medicine, 3 (2): 145– 57.
Levitas, Ruth, 1996. “The Concept of Social Exclusion and the New
Durkheimian Hegemony.” Critical Social Policy, 16 (46): 5 –20.
Lindert, Kathy, Anja Linder, Jason Hobbs, and Bénédicte de la Brière.
2007. The Nuts and Bolts of Brazil’s Bolsa Famı́lia Program:
Implementing Conditional Cash Transfers in a Decentralized Context.
Washington: World Bank, Social Protection Discussion Paper.
482 V Jenson
Lindh, Thomas, Bo Malmberg, and Joakim Palme. 2005. “Generations at

War or Sustainable Social Policy?” Journal of Political Philosophy, 13
(4): 470– 89.
Lowndes, Vivien, and David Wilson. 2001. “Social Capital and Local
Governance: Exploring the Institutional Design Variable.” Political
Studies, 49 (4): 629 – 47.
Lundberg, Shelley, Robert Pollack, and Terence Wales. 1997. “Do Husbands
and Wives and Pool Their Resources? Evidence from the United Kingdom
Child Benefit.” Journal of Human Resources, XXXII (3): 463–80.
Madrid, Raúl. 2002. “The Politics and Economics of Pension Privatization

in Latin America.” Latin American Research Review, 37 (2): 159– 82.
Mahon, Rianne. 2006. “The OECD and the Work/Family Reconciliation
Agenda. Competing Frames.” In Children, Changing Families and Welfare
States, ed. Jane Lewis, 173–200. Chelthenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
Marques-Pereira, Bérengère. 2007. “Le Chili et les rapports de genre.
Quel ‘régime de citoyenneté’ pour les femmes?” In L’état des citoyen-
netés en Europe et dans les Amériques, eds. Jane Jenson, Bérengère
Marques-Pereira, and Éric Remacle. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de
Montréal.
Martin, Andrew, and George Ross, eds. 1999. The Brave New World of
European Labor. Oxford and NY: Berghahn Books.
Meyer, Margit, and Katherine N. Rankin. 2002. “Social Capital and
(Community) Development. A North –South Perspective.” Antipodes, 34
(4): 804 –08.
Molyneux, Maxine. 2002. “Gender and the Silences of Social Capital:
Lessons from Latin America.” Development and Change, 32 (2):
167 –88
————. 2006. “Mothers at the Service of the New Poverty Agenda:
Progresa/Oportunidades, Mexico’s Conditional Transfer Programme.”
Social Politics and Administration, 40 (4): 429 – 40.
Murphy, Craig. 2006. The United Nations Development Programme. A
Better Way? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nelson, Barbara, and Najma Chowdhury, eds. 1994. Women and Politics
Worldwide. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Newman, Janet, Marian Barnes, Helen Sullivan, and Andrew Knops. 2004.
“Public Participation and Collaborative Governance.” Journal of Social
Policy, 33 (2): 203 – 23.
O’Connor, Julia S., Ann S. Orloff, and Sheila Shaver. 1999. States,
Markets, Families. Gender, Liberalism and Social Policy in Australia,
Canada, Great Britain and the United States. Cambridge. Cambridge
University Press.
OECD. 2003. Asset Building and the Escape from Poverty. A New Welfare
Policy Debate. Paris: OECD.
————. 2006. Starting Strong II. Paris: OECD.
Palier, Bruno. 2002. “De la crise aux réformes de l’État-providence: Le cas
français en perspective comparée.” Revue française de sociologie, 43 (2):
243 –75.
————. 2008. “Présentation.” In Trois Leçons sur l’État-providence, eds.

Gøsta Esping-Andersen, with Bruno Palier, 5– 17. Paris: Seuil.
Pearson, Mark, and Peter Scherer. 1997. “Balancing Security and
Sustainability in Social Policy.” The OECD Observer, 205 (April –
May): 6 – 9.
Porter, Doug, and David Craig. 2004. “The Third Way and the Third
World: Poverty Reduction and Social Inclusion in the Rise of ‘Inclusive’
Liberalism.” Review of International Political Economy, 11 (2):
387 –423.
Roberts, Bryan R., and Alejandro Portes. 2006. “Coping with the

Free Market City. Collective Action in Six Latin American Cities at the
End of the 20th century.” Latin American Research Review, 41 (2):
60 – 83.
Schild, Verónica. 2000. “Neo-liberalism’s New Gendered Market Citizens:
The ‘Civilizing’ Dimension of Social Programmes in Chile.” Citizenship
Studies, 4 (3): 275– 305.
Schmidt, Vivien A., and Claudio M. Radaelli. 2004. “Policy Change and
Discourse in Europe: Conceptual and Methodological Issues.” West
European Politics, 27 (2): 183– 210.
Schuller, Tom. 2007. “Reflections on the Use of Social Capital.” Review of
Social Economy, 65 (1): 11 –28.
Secretarı́a de Desarrollo Social. 2003. Programa Institucional Oportunidades
2002–2006. Mexico: Programa de Desarrollo Humano Oportunidades.
http://www.oportunidades.gob.mx/pdfs/prog_oportunidades.pdf.
(accessed February 1, 2008).
Sen, Amaryta. 2000. Social Exclusion: Concept, Application and Scrutiny.
Office of Environment and Social Development, Asian Development
Bank, Social Development Papers #1. Manila: ADB.
Soares, Sergei, R. Guerreiro Osório, F. Veras Saores, M. Medeiros, and E.
Zepeda. 2007. Conditional Cash Transfers in Brazil, Chile and Mexico:
Impacts upon Inequality. Brasilia: International Poverty Centre,
Working Paper #35, April.
UNICEF. 2000. A League Table of Child Poverty in Rich Nations.
Florence: Innocenti Research Centre.
Weber, Max. 1946. “The Social Psychology of the World Religions.” In
From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H. H. Gerth, and C. Wright
Mills. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Yashar, Deborah. 1999. “Democracy, Indigenous Movements, and the
Postliberal Challenge in Latin America.” World Politics, 52 (1): 76 –
104.
————. 2005. Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of
Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge. New York:
Cambridge University Press.

Jenson, Jane - Lost in Translation. The Social Investment Perpective and Gender Equality PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Jenson, Jane - Lost in Translation. The Social Investment Perpective and Gender Equality PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

JA N E J E N S O N

Lost in Translation: The Social

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

In the mid-1990s neoliberalism was being challenged by

Summarizing the direction of change, Bruno Palier wrote of an idea-

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

dimensions of social citizenship that in combination form a new citi-

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

represent attempts to improve women’s access to existing edu-

opportunities and ultimately to make those resources more

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

From Social Protection to Social Investment: Reconfiguring

decades after 1945 as well as the safety-net stance of neoliberals.13

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

Box 1. Social Values Compared.

Moral values traditionally associated Values identified for a social investment

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

The ideas underpinning the social investment perspective shape

All of these shifts in ideas about time and about appropriate

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

The Responsibility Mix

funds. Sometimes the partnership was quite explicit, as in some of the

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

Describing neoliberals’ position on social citizenship in Latin

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

private strategies to enable low-income persons to save and accumu-

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

Rights and Duties of Citizenship

citizenship rights was the norm.25 Some existing social citizenship

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

In Europe, concerns about the limits of social rights, particularly in

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

services, parental leave, and tax packages to encourage women to

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

They therefore hold promise for addressing the inter-

new social policy theories and program administration prac-

Promoted widely by the development policy community, major pro-

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

employment and the consequences of “informal” work. Reform has

Governance Arrangements and Citizenship Regimes

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

“Modern social democrats solve problems where they can best be

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

local partnership reflects the perceived limits of both ‘statist’

But it is not only in Europe that the neoliberals’ enthusiasm for

When López Obrador took office, . . . he integrated these assem-

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

In addition to consultation, a goal of the integrated programme was

Convergence Around Social Investment: Is Gender Awareness

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

to the latter, a policy focus on “women and development” took off

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

important policy instrument available to achieve an appropriate

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

words, displays no concern about gender equality in the workplace,

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

gender pay gaps.50 By the time of the synthesis report in 2007,

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

health of, and provides support for, pregnant and breastfeeding

Downloaded from http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ at Southern Methodist University on March 27, 2015

concern about demography and because of the way the interge-