Trust, Human Rights and Civil Society Within Mixed Economies of Welfare, 2020-2021

This project examined the issues, progress and challenges facing Civil Society Organisations as they deliver, and shape, welfare and press for the advancement of human rights. We examined developments in domiciliary and community based adult social care. In particular, we explore policy developments and practice in Wales, Scotland, England and Northern Ireland, looking to provide new insights into the territorialisation of welfare in the wake of devolution in the UK in 1998/9. In turn this tells us about the efficacy of different welfare mixes and policy divergence in a quasi-federal UK. The original data gathering associated with this work involves multiple semi-structured interviews with national and local third sector organisations concerned with social care delivery, complemented by interviews with regulatory and other state bodies. A key research question is: ‘how do third sector organisations perceive the issues, progress and challenges of their welfare delivery role?’. In the wake of the pandemic, we also sought practitioners’ views on the impact of the COVID-19 emergency on third sector organisations’ social care delivery and how responses were also shaped by the unique context found in each of the four nations.