Welfare State, Geography of

Abstract

The ‘welfare state’ describes the institutions and policies of states that are devoted to the delivery of human and social services, poverty amelioration, and enhancement of human well-being. These institutions and policies are intended to ensure that the basic needs of the population are met with regard to food, housing, education, income, and health. The welfare state can be conceptualized as a framework that guides three types of decisions: decisions about services to be provided, institutional arrangements for provision, and the scale of provision and decision-making. The decisions made with respect to each of these reflect the interplay of many pressures and contextual forces. Three sources of variation are of particular importance: the resources and overall wealth available to countries, differences in ideologies and political cultures that shape the ways states conceptualize their roles, and pressures from international organizations. As a result of these decisions, the welfare state is temporally and geographically variable. The international trend toward local, rather than national-level welfare provision promises to heighten the unevenness of welfare provision and welfare outcomes. This unevenness will reflect the resources, capacities, and intentions of communities and localities, and may create new forms of uneven development.