Transforming the Welfare State, One Case at a Time: How Utrecht Makes Customized Social Care Work

Charles Sabel, Jonathan Zeitlin and Jan-Kees Helderman
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Charles Sabel: Columbia Law School
Jonathan Zeitlin: University of Amsterdam
Jan-Kees Helderman: Radboud University Nijmegen

Politics & Society, 2024, vol. 52, issue 2, 171-207

Abstract: Advanced welfare states are under pressure to customize services, promptly enough to prevent a cascade of harms. With these goals, the Netherlands in 2015 decentralized social care services to municipalities, and within municipalities to neighborhood teams in continuing contact with clients. The overall results have been disappointing. But the experience of Utrecht, the Netherlands’ fourth-largest city, has been strikingly different. By using hard-to-resolve cases to signal conflicts in rules, obstructive jurisdictional boundaries, and the shortcomings of private service providers, Utrecht is learning to customize and speed delivery of social care through incremental steps. This article explains how Utrecht's success addresses apparently intractable limits to the adaptability of the rule-bound welfare state, such as the problem of low-level discretion or street-level bureaucracy and the division of services into silos, in the process bridging, and perhaps effacing, the gap between the Habermasian life world and the system world of formal rules.

Keywords: welfare state; social work; customized care; integrated teams; decentralization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:polsoc:v:52:y:2024:i:2:p:171-207

DOI: 10.1177/00323292221140710

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