The ‘new social contract’ and the individualisation of risk in policy

Abstract

Over the last three decades in Australia and Britain, there has been a transformation in the character of the post-Second World War welfare state away from shared responsibility for managing social risks through collective pooling mechanisms towards more individualised responsibility for managing lifecourse risks such as unemployment, parenthood and disability. In liberal welfare states like Australia and Britain, one result has been a range of activation or 'workfare' policies. While there has been much discussion about the reasons for these policies and the outcomes for citizens, there is very little exploration of the process by which risks have been individualised through government activation policies. The principle of individual responsibility is politically difficult to sell to citizens and yet how it has been packaged in policy terms has been neglected in the literature. This paper aims to explore the political rationale for the individualisation of risk in the process of contemporary welfare reform by examining government policy documents in Australia and Britain over the last 30 years -- the period in which contemporary welfare reform and its emphasis on activation policies emerged. In both countries, I will argue that it is ideas about contractual reciprocity that have been mobilised to legitimise the principle that individuals should manage the risks associated with the lifecourse.