ICSP: The International and Comparitive Social Policy group

WHAT IS COMPARATIVE SOCIAL POLICY?

Although there is a long tradition of scholarship focused on the development of welfare states in comparative perspective, Comparative Social Policy analysis has rapidly increased its importance within the discipline since the late 1980s. Differentiation and explanation of types of welfare regime continues to be a significant element of comparative study, but comparative analysis also takes a more focused approach to the investigation of Social Policy. This approach emphasises the particularity of different welfare activities rather than the more general shape of welfare states and has become a core area of study due to the development of closer relationships between countries. These closer relationships are expressed in a variety of ways:

through membership of supranational organisations which represent shared economic, political and social objectives
through countries’ shared experience of economic, social and political problems
more directly through processes of policy transfer.

Comparative approaches to Social Policy incorporate a range of research methods and theoretical frameworks which attempt to describe, evaluate and explain similarity and divergence in the welfare arrangements of different countries. Comparative analysis enables us to expand our understanding of the means by which a range of human needs are addressed within different social, historical, political, economic and cultural contexts and the specific interplay between the differing nature of social divisions and the various forms of welfare state.

What is International Social Policy?

Social policy has to be studied from both a national and a transnational perspective. International Social Policy is distinct from social policy generally insofar as the emphasis of the former is primarily on transnational, supranational and global forms of collective action while that of the latter is primarily on national and sub-national forms of collective action. Deacon, Hulse and Stubbs (1997) Global Social Policy: international organisations and the future of welfare (London: Sage) defined the field of international social policy as embracing issues of global redistribution, regulation and provision by inter-governmental and non-governmental organisations, agencies and groups. The definition also embraced the ways in which such transnational agencies seek to influence national policy.