A Policy Travelogue Tracing Welfare Reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada [Paperback]

An ethnography of the development and travel of the New Zealand model of neoliberal welfare reform, this study explores the social life of policy, which is one of process, motion, and change. Different actors, including not only policy ?lites but also providers and recipients, engage with it in light of their own resources and knowledge. Drawing on two analytic frameworks of the contemporary anthropology of policytranslation and assemblageKingfisher situates policy as an artifact and architect of cultural meaning, as well as a site of power struggles. All points of engagement with policy are approached as sites of policy production that serve to transform it as well as reproduce it. As such,A Policy Travelogueprovides an antidote to theorizations of policy as a-cultural, rational, and straightforwardly technical.

Catherine Kingfisheris Professor of Anthropology at the University of Lethbridge. She is editor ofWestern Welfare in Decline: Globalization and Women’s Poverty(2002) and author ofWomen in the American Welfare Trap(1996). Her research focuses on policy, governance, personhood, gender, and, most recently, happiness and well-being.

Kingfishers book is a theoretically productive account of how welfare reform policies develop and travel&from the world of policy elites to the daily lives of poor single mothers& An important strength of Kingfishers book is the range of data she uses from locations that are less discussed in the literature on policy and especially in the literature on welfare reform.? PoLAR

Despite the empirical challenges evident in research that focuses on welfare policy in two different locations and on different levels of policy, Kingfisher skillfully composes her results into a coherent narrative [...] I'd recommend the book especially as course material, since it opens up possibilities for analyzing the phenomenon we call the wl£S