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In Britain the relationship between welfare rights and responsibilities has undergone change. A new welfare 'consensus' that emphasizes a citizen ship centred on notions of duty rather than rights has been built. This has allowed the state to reduce its role as a provider of welfare and also defend a position in which the welfare rights of some citizens are increas ingly conditional on those individuals meeting compulsory responsibili ties or duties. This concentration on individual responsibility/duty has undermined the welfare rights of some of the poorest members of society. Three levels of debate are considered within the article: academic, pol itical and 'grassroots'. The latter is included in an attempt to allow some 'bottom up' views into what is largely a debate dominated by social sci entists and politicians.

This article outlines the prospects for new political strategies for state welfare in Britain in the 1990s, based upon the notion of citizenship and the idea of right to welfare as alternatives to the Thatcherite appeal for a private market in Welfare provision. The failure of post war state welfare provisions, which has been exploited over the past decade by Thatcher ism, was in large part a product of their failure to recognise the rights of consumers of welfare services. A commitment to guaranteed rights to welfare, coupled with democratic participation in the delivery of welfare services, could be the basis of a universal and popular appeal for renewed support for a different form of state welfare in the future. The development of welfare rights work over recent years provides an (incomplete) model of how such a strategy could be articulated in practice.

AbstractThis paper is an edited version of an address given at a seminar on 'Future Directions in Child Welfare' held at Monash University in May 1985. The seminar's aim was to facilitate discussion of the Victorian Child Welfare Legislation and Practice Review Report (The Carney Report).

AbstractIn Western Europe, as immigration flows increase – or at least become more salient – and austerity measures place welfare states under pressure, policy reforms that extend or restrict access to the welfare state for immigrants are highly contested. Much academic attention has been paid to restrictive or 'welfare chauvinist' policy reforms and the role played by far‐right parties and sympathisers in the policy‐making process. Yet, left‐wing parties, often considered the most susceptible to the 'progressive's dilemma' between open borders and strong welfare states, remain under‐researched. Using new data on immigrant welfare rights for 14 European countries from 1980 to 2018, and differentiating between social democrats, the greens and far‐left parties, we show that social democrats engage in both reforms that restrict as well as expand, but on average, they tend to be negatively associated with immigrant welfare rights. However, our evidence shows that context matters: We find that that social democrats are less likely to retrench immigrant welfare rights when they share power with the far left, and become more likely to retrench as unemployment rises.

This paper proposes a survey of the many ways in which people look at and deal with animals in contemporary India. On the basis of ethnographic research and of multiple written sources (judgments, newspapers, websites, legal files, activist pamphlets, etc.), I present some of the actors involved in the animal debate&mdash ; animal activists, environmental lawyers, judges, and hunter-conservationists&mdash ; who adopt different, though sometimes interconnected, approaches to animals. Some of them look at animals as victims that need to be rescued and treated in the field, others fight for animals in Parliament or in Court so that they can be entitled to certain rights, others are concerned with the issue of species survival, where the interest of the group prevails on the protection of individual animals. In the context of a predominantly secularist background of the people engaged in such debates, I also examine the role that religion may, in certain cases, play for some of them: whether as a way of constructing a Hindu or Buddhist cultural or political identity, or as a strategic argument in a legal battle in order to obtain public attention. Lastly, I raise the question of the role played by animals themselves in these different situations&mdash ; as intellectual principles to be fought for (or to be voiced) in their absence, or as real individuals to interact with and whose encounter may produce different kinds of sometimes conflicting emotions.