Exploring the Role of Social Protection in UK Asylum-Seeker Wellbeing Using Human Scale Development Theory

Michelle James () and Rachel Forrester-Jones
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Michelle James: Department of Social & Policy Sciences, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7JP, UK
Rachel Forrester-Jones: School of Health Studies, Faculty of Health Sciences, Western University, London, ON N6A 3K7, Canada

Social Sciences, 2025, vol. 14, issue 8, 1-26

Abstract: This article utilises Max-Neef’s Human Scale Development (HSD) framework (1991) to answer two research questions: what impact does government and community-based social protection (SP) have on UK asylum-seeker wellbeing; how are interactions with all forms of SP, both as giver and receiver, supporting or harming the satisfaction of asylum-seekers’ fundamental human needs at this time? The research study utilised a mixed-methods, collaborative, case study design situated within a refugee and asylum-seeker (RAS) support charity in Southwest England. Methods included peer-led Qualitative Impact Protocol interviews, Photovoice, surveys, and staff interviews. Data were subjected to an inductive, bottom-up process on Causal Map software (version 2, Causal Map Ltd., 39 Apsley Rd., Bath BA1 3LP, UK) and the analysis used the HSD framework. We found eight over-arching themes. The four main needs-violators/destroyers of asylum-seeker wellbeing were dehumanisation, unfreedoms, enforced ignorance, and (re)traumatisation, and the four main needs-satisfiers were common humanity, autonomy and resistance, exerting agency through knowledge exchange, and healing. Five policy and practice-focused bridging satisfiers are recommended to help move individual and collective experience from a negative to a positive state in the research population. Policy and practice should be transparent and evidence-based, efficient and equitable, supportive of participation and productivity, trauma-informed, and multi-agency.

Keywords: asylum seeker; refugee; social protection; wellbeing; social policy; human-scale development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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