Political Economies of Scale: Fast Policy, Interscalar Relations, and Neoliberal Workfare

Taking as its point of departure recent debates on the theoretical status of scale and rescaling in political-economic geography, this article explores the scalar politics of neoliberal workfare. This tendentially hegemonic form of neoliberal social and labor-market policy combines objectives of the dismantling of welfare and the rollback of entitlements with an insistent focus on the activation and enforcement of work. The welfare/workfare restructuring process is an illustration of a deeply politicized and highly dynamic form of regulatory rescaling, based inter alia on the selective appropriation of disembedded local programming models and their purposeful circulation around extralocal policy networks, the dumping of regulatory risks and responsibilities at the local scale and that of the “poor body,” and the complex orchestration of ostensibly decentralized policy regimes by national states and transnational agencies and intermediaries. The rollback of Keynesian-welfarist institutions at the level of the national state provides the (scaled) context for the emergence of these neoliberalized political forms, but crucially, these forms are also beginning to exhibit their own distinctive dynamics and logics—captured here in terms of an ascendant regime of “fast-policy” formation. Workfare regimes are not monolithic systems, but dynamic configurations of restless reform, technocratic emulation, and tangled scalar relations. Politically constructed, they are also responsive/subject to (scaled) processes of local policy failure and social contestation. Scale and scale relations certainly matter, then, but in ways that are politically mediated and institutionally specific, rather than theoretically preordained.