A critical examination of welfare state constructions of income support recipients and addiction

Similarly, a 2015 study of 51families living in poverty in Northern Ireland by Daly and Kelly, Families and Poverty: Everyday life on a low income,

reported that bad individual choices and behaviour cannot in isolation be blamed for disadvantage given the range of structural factors such as illness and family violence and abuse that framed the lives of many of these families.

Arecent 2018 reportby the Good Shepherd agency in Victoria titled The experience of single mothers on Welfare to Work similarly reported that of 26 single mothers interviewed, more than two thirds were involved in paid work ranging from stable employment to casual or short-term:

Secondly, the model totally ignores the different life opportunities that those growing up and living in poverty experience compared with those who enjoy greater social and economic resources. The finding that children of the poor and unemployed - deprived of adequate educational, training and employment opportunities – are more likely to end up poor and unemployed is hardly surprising.

Towards effective intervention: Co-design program development with service users

Increasingly, policy makers are recognizing that top-down paternalistic approaches to social problems do not work, and instead turning to co-design approaches. Co-design which is sometimes called co-production refers to a bottom-up process whereby policy makers partner as equals with excluded groups such as service users and carers. Their experiential knowledge and capabilities are utilized via a process of mutual education to define a social problem, identify needs to be met and an associated range of potential service options, plan and implement a program, and evaluate the outcome. Co-design or co-production processes emphasize the importance of facilitating participation by diverse groups, and ensuring access for all who want to participate which often means paying service users for their time and/or funding skills training for them. Additionally, the result of a co-design process must be subject to negotiation with participating groups, and cannot be predetermined.

Co-design processes are generally informed by community development principles. By community development, I refer to the employment of local community structures and networks to address social needs and empower groups of people. A community development approach to a social problem such as unemployment or substance abuse would involve engaging with community members who were unemployed or substance users, consulting with those community organizations that are involved with and have knowledge of the experiences of disadvantaged groups, and ensuring that the local community per se plays a key role in both defining the causes of the problem, and identifying potential policy solutions. Key principles would be the inclusion of all local residents including potentially marginalized minority groups such as illicit drug users and the homeless in the policy development process, and the empowerment of disadvantaged groups by giving them the capacity alongside other community members and organisations to participate in the development and implementation of policy strategies. Empowerment goes well beyond mere consultations with service users which they often view as tokenistic, rather it aims to redistribute power and control to service users so that they have the authority to genuinely influence service delivery and policy change.

In the case of welfare dependency/chronic social disadvantage, a co-design process based on community development principles would involve the following: policy makers would convene public meetings in those localities known to have high numbers of persons long-term reliant on income support. These meetings would seek to engage two principal groups: long-term income support recipients and representative service user organisations; and representatives of the key non-government and government services that currently work with these disadvantaged groups. These two groups would seek via open discussion to consensually identify the problem and its causes (whether it is welfare dependency or financial poverty, and whether the cause is personal actions or lack of jobs or limited housing), the potential solutions, and a service delivery plan. Additionally, those two groups would later participate in a review or evaluation to determine whether the programs had worked, and to plan future service and policy strategies.

The stark difference between co-design/community development bottom-up strategies that are informed by lived expertise, and the top-down processes involving limited consultations used to introduce compulsory income management, drug testing trials and other forms of conditional welfare that often target drug and alcohol service users should be obvious.