Guest editorial: Shifting boundaries of elder care: changing roles and responsibilities.

Abstract

This thematic section of the European Journal of Ageing addresses care for older people in a number of European countries, in regards to the consequences that shifting boundaries of responsibility for financing, organising and providing care have had for older persons as care recipients and for informal and formal care workers. The initiative for this section comes from the Nordic Centre of Excellence: ‘Reassessing the Nordic Welfare Model’ (REASSESS) and within this from the strand ‘Care in ageing and diversifying societies’. The interest in the consequences of the shifting boundaries of care stems from the major changes that European welfare states and elder care policies have been facing in recent decades. These changes and re-structuring processes of care policies and service provision have changed the situation of carers considerably, both in the informal and formal sector, of older people in need of care and their members of kin. Care policies compose the structural environment of elder care and changes in it have many intended and unintended consequences for different actors; informal and formal carers, elders and their kin members. The overarching trend in elder care during recent decades seems to have been the politisation of care, meaning that care for older people has increasingly become a political matter that requires actions from decision-makers and public bodies. One evident consequence of politisation of care is the formalisation of care practices and relations. Formalisation means that public involvement in financing, regulating, organizing and providing care is increasing. This does not necessarily mean that more public elder care services are produced across Europe. It may as well mean that by offering cash allowances to support informal care given by intimates, the work of informal carers is for example regulated by agreements and contracts. Cash benefits in informal care have led to what has been termed semi-formalisation (Geissler and Pfau-Effinger 2005) of care where formal agreements and money have entered the informal care relations. Certain cash benefits, especially the Dutch personal budget and the Italian and Austrian cash allowances, have resulted in an increase of the employment of unprofessional care workers, commonly hired on a private basis to work in people’s homes. In all three countries, a large proportion of these unprofessional care workers are migrants. However, this ethnicisation of care work does not only happen in the undeclared economy, also service providers in the official economy recruit immigrants living in the country and attract people from abroad to work in the care sector, so the phenomenon of ethnicisation of care is also visible in countries with extensive formal care systems, such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Parallel with formalisation and semi-formalisation of care, we see that in some countries the trend of informalisation is also detectable. This is more visible especially in some Nordic countries where the role of formal care from public services has for some time been an essential component of the elder care arrangements, but where these services have become more strictly targeted or even cut extensively. Informalisation can be understood as part of a larger development of privatisation of care where the responsibilities of organising, funding, and providing care are increasingly becoming private issues. This can result in T. Rostgaard (&) Department of Political Science, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark e-mail: tr@dps.aau.dk