Over the years, cultural and linguistic diversity in schools across Europe has significantly increased due to migration and refugee flows. In response, international organizations, such as the Council of Europe and the European Commission, advocate intercultural education as both an educational strategy and a social policy tool to foster inclusion, address inequality, and build cohesive societies. This study contributes to the intercultural education literature by addressing an underexplored area: the process of translating intercultural policies into school practices. Using Street-Level Bureaucracy theory and qualitative research in Trento, Italy, it highlights the mechanisms and challenges shaping teachers’ practices and the extent of the policy–practice gap. Furthermore, the research also contributes to the Street-Level Bureaucracy theory. It shows that teachers can act as innovators in the policy implementation process. By engaging civil society members, notably students and members of migrant communities, as co-implementers, teachers reshape policy ecosystems through participatory and bottom-up approaches.

Latin American and South European countries share a common policy legacy of public Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) pension systems, yet reform paths taken over the past decades between and within the two regions have varied. Latin American countries opted for the full or partial privatization of their public pension systems, yet subsequent reforms have challenged the public–private mix. Meanwhile, countries in Southern Europe opted for a less radical path, entailing different degrees of reform of their public pillars and the introduction of supplementary private ones. Our analysis focuses on Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay – in Latin America – and Spain, Italy, and Greece – in Southern Europe – and the reforms implemented since 1990. In understanding reform variation, we argue that by focusing on the role of political institutions and policy legacies, it is possible to identify reform mechanisms.

This study explores the moderating role of women’s political empowerment in addressing child poverty across European Union (EU) countries, using macro-panel data from 27 EU countries between 2006 and 2023. The study investigates how key socio-economic factors – such as unemployment and government expenditure as mitigating factors – interact with women’s political empowerment in affecting child poverty. The findings show that the political empowerment of women mitigates the negative effects of high unemployment and enhances the impact of public spending. However, no significant moderating effect was observed for early school leaving and income inequality. The study highlights the importance of women’s political participation in shaping inclusive policies for child welfare, especially in contexts of high unemployment or limited public spending. By empowering women politically, policymakers can foster environments that better target child poverty through tailored interventions and improved social policies, offering valuable insights for breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty.

Since its inception in 2009, Argentina’s Universal Child Allowance (AUH) has become the country’s most comprehensive social protection policy for children, emphasising standardisation and objectivity. However, its implementation occurs in contexts of poverty and inequality, leading to uneven outcomes across communities. This study examines how street-level bureaucrats adapt large-scale policies like the AUH to local contexts marked by deep social disparities. Although the AUH is designed for standardized and automated implementation, frontline workers play a critical role in adjusting the policy to specific territorial needs. These bureaucrats employ informal strategies and policy improvisation to mitigate institutional weaknesses and address gaps in the AUH’s rigid framework. By analysing the interplay between the policy’s institutional design, frontline workers, and adaptations, this study sheds light on how street-level bureaucracies at multiple levels enable these workers to navigate local challenges and partially compensate for broader institutional fragility.

This article posits that the multi-level governance literature can benefit from administrative burden theory if scholars are interested in understanding under which conditions policy implementation fails. To support this argument, we build on these two bodies of research to examine how implicit welfare rescaling – where the central government expands its role in a previously devolved policy – may increase administrative burdens for claimants, and to what extent local welfare systems can help to mitigate these burdens despite lacking coordination. To address these research aims, we assess the implementation of the “Ingreso Mínimo Vital,” a national minimum income scheme introduced in Spain within a fragmented regional system. Qualitative fieldwork with frontline professionals and policy experts shows that welfare rescaling heightened claimants’ administrative burdens due to inter-institutional misfit among governance levels. This imposed substantial learning, compliance, and psychological costs on claimants, making frontline professionals essential for guiding them through these challenges.

Housing informality has emerged across developing and developed societies amid the global housing crisis. This article presents an intra-national comparative analysis of informal housing interventions in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, two major Chinese cities, to investigate the policies and discourses of urban housing informality and the factors shaping different governance regimes. A critical policy discourse analysis was conducted on official documents addressing subdivided units in Hong Kong and urban villages in Guangzhou between 2010 and 2023. The analysis focuses on policy goals, interventive measures and state-market-society relations, revealing that despite similarities between subdivided units and urban villages, government interventions differ significantly. The Hong Kong government has adopted a regulatory-welfare-mix model, whereas the Guangzhou government has pursued a developmental approach to address the phenomenon. This article contributes to policy studies by comparing informal housing intervention approaches and analysing the within-country divergence of normative goals and policy levers under different sociopolitical contexts.

Global crises constitute challenges for social policy. While social policy is predominantly a national concern, international organisations (IOs) contribute frames of reference for state decisions. In this article, we explore whether the COVID-19 pandemic led to changes in IOs’ social policy ideas and recommendations in health care, labour market, and social protection policies due to how IOs perceived the crisis’ specific nature, severity, and global scope. We focus on four IOs regarded as key actors in global social policy, namely the ILO, OECD, WHO, and the World Bank. Theoretically, we employ a framework of ideational policy change combining different levels (recommendations – including parameters and instruments – and paradigmatic ideas) with different types of change (layering, conversion, dismantlement, and displacement). We find that IOs have not fundamentally reimagined their pre-pandemic stances during the pandemic. The IOs’ perceptions of the crisis do not undermine IOs’ ideas and recommendations but highlight their appropriateness.

Welfare state research is at a theoretical impasse insofar as it does not systematically speak to the types of social policy effort that may have not only redistributive but also productive consequences. Cautioning against imprudent use of the social investment label this paper argues for a better understanding of how traditional social policies have enabled society’s adaptation to socioeconomic changes and prevented costly experiences of poverty. Synthesizing ideas drawn from development studies in the Global South and welfare state studies in the Global North, and elaborating on the inclusive strand of welfare developmentalism, the paper conceptualizes what allows existing social policies to be simultaneously protective and productive. It reviews current welfare state research and argues that developmentalist ideas help re-centre the (re)productive role of social policy. It proposes principles for thinking coherently about what makes existing welfare state policies developmental, challenging their characterization as exclusively passive or activating. Recognizing the productive impact of existing social policies requires that we explicitly rethink how welfare state policy effort is understood.