Across Europe, welfare reforms are reshaping not only systems of support but the very terms of citizenship and state care. Alongside conditional regimes designed to move citizens off benefits, another formation is emerging: the intimate welfare state – a mode of governance that operates through proximity, collaboration and personal engagement.
Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research with Amsterdam’s Parent and Child Teams, Remaking Welfare in the Netherlands examines how this intimate welfare state is imagined and enacted by frontline professionals. The book attends to the fantasies, ethical commitments and everyday dilemmas that animate these reforms, including the negotiation of race within ostensibly universalist frameworks of care.
The book argues that this emerging formation has a psychic life of its own: animated by aspirations toward a friendly, caring and accessible state, yet haunted by enduring fears of bureaucratic intrusion and state violence. Bringing ethnographic insight into conversation with debates on welfare and social policy, the book offers a fresh perspective on contemporary transformations of governance in the Netherlands and on the political futures now being forged across Europe.