Image: University of York/Alex Holland
Social policy, whether as cash benefits, public services or regulatory measures, is an institutionalised form of solidarity. Welfare systems are mechanisms to pool resources to manage social risks collectively. Welfare systems also achieve the redistribution of resources, from the more well-off to the less well-off, to those in need of support, and across the life cycle.
Notwithstanding the multiple gaps, shortcomings and ambiguities that characterise existing welfare systems and that can undermine the effectiveness of social policy interventions, ties of solidarity in their different variants are an essential or arguably necessary condition for the continued viability of social policies. Ties that create levels of national cohesion to imbue welfare states with legitimacy; ties that create consent to redistributive taxation; ties that enable public attitudes in support of collective risk management and social protection for individuals from diverse social groups, despite a context of societal individualisation. With social policy both depending on such ties and enabling them, the future of social policy is likely to be shaped by the state of these solidarities.
Yet, across the globe, social policy is operating within fraught and increasingly conflictual economic, social, political and environmental contexts, marked by eroding solidarities. This has the potential to accelerate divergences in national policies addressing societal challenges, while growing devolution can create policy divergence within countries. Moreover, trends towards heightened polarisation and division within nation-states and communities risk undermining collectivism. This is placing new pressures on both public institutions and civil society to alleviate social inequalities and divisions, and to institutionalise forms of solidarity that are adapted to current policy conditions.
It is this theme that ran across the East Asian Social Policy Research Network (EASP) and Social Policy Association (SPA) Joint Annual Conference 2025 – “Go your own way? Social Policy in an era of fracturing solidarities” – held from 2nd to 4th July 2025 at the University of York, UK.
Three excellent plenary sessions expanded on the conference theme. Sophia Seung-yoon Lee (Chung-Ang University, Korea), opened the conference with her address “Solidarity in Crisis? Melting Labour, Welfare State Drift, and the Rise of Youth Precariat in South Korea”. Her talk unpacked the growing drift between welfare state protection and the reality of employment in a world of “melting labour”. She focused in particular on increasing levels of precarious and sometimes hyper-short-term work and asked how such trends might be reshaping and fracturing social relations. She raised important questions about the impact of these changes on political behaviour, including a growing bifurcation of voting by gender amongst those in their 20s and 30s, with male voters beginning to lean more heavily towards conservatives, female voters towards progressives. She cross-referenced this with gendered differences in the rise of precarious work and declining economic optimism, young men showing higher and more rapidly rising rates of precarity in their work and more sharply increasing tendencies to be pessimistic about prospects for upward social mobility.
Image: Sophia Seung-yoon Lee; Day 1 plenary session; ©Paul Shields
Day 2 saw Kate Pickett (University of York) chair a plenary panel discussion with four speakers – David Harris (Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy, USA), Sophie Howes (Child Poverty Action Group, UK), Irene Yue Hoong Ng (National University of Singapore, Singapore) and Peter Whiteford (Australian National University, Australia) – on the topic “Can Progressive Social Policies Flourish in an Era of Fracturing Solidarities?”. In a wide ranging session the speakers reviewed the varying landscape for progressive social policy across high-income countries and answered a broad range of questions, while a team of ‘plenary listeners’ helped to collate questions and contributions from the audience. The session highlighted important variations in the social and political landscape across different countries and regions – cautioning against allowing the mood to be driven too heavily by cases where anti-welfare state governments are in the driving seat – and reminded us that even where the environment is hostile, opportunities for growing social policy interventions can still exist. But contributions from the panel and from the floor reflected the troubling concerns the session as a whole focused on, in particular questions about how social policies might flourish when public sentiment polarises and where populist politics is on the rise. Perhaps the core theme that emerged was around the questions of when and whether social policy research needs to speak more effectively to the political right and, if so, how.
Image: from left to right, Irene Yue Hoong Ng, Peter Whiteford, Sophie Howes, David Harris, Kate Pickett; Day 2 plenary session; ©Elizabeth Cookingham Bailey
This theme was further developed in the Day 3 plenary chaired by Chris Holden (University of York), where Megan Challis (Associate Director for Government Relations and Strategic Partnerships at the Wellcome Trust) discussed “Policy making in a period of fractured global identity”, with a focus on three interconnected global challenges – the ‘3 Ps’ of polarisation, populism and post-truth. She underlined the increasingly polarised nature of political contestation within a structural context of large social inequalities, with populism as a political strategy that frames societal conflicts as being between unaccountable elites and a culturally homogeneous people. A framing that is both simplistic and problematic for the consolidation and preservation of solidarities between diverse social groups and beyond national boundaries. As a further overarching challenge, Megan commented on the emergence of post-truth conditions, in which a shared sense of reality across different groups and political persuasions is increasingly at risk of erosion, notably through the effects of social media echo chambers and limits to the availability of data.
Image: from left to right, Megan Challis, Chris Holden; Day 3 plenary session; ©Elizabeth Cookingham Bailey
Similar themes – and many others – were explored in the parallel paper sessions, of which there were almost 90, comprising around 225 open stream papers and 85 symposia contributions. Recurrent themes in many presentations were diverse barriers in accessing social protection systems, the impact of existing and emerging inequalities on solidarity and well-being, the multiple strains faced by care systems, and wider questions of trust in and effectiveness of welfare governance.
This conference marks the second time the University of York has hosted a joint EASP-SPA conference: the first time, in 2012, the event set a record for attendance at SPA and EASP events. And with 393 registered delegates attending the 2025 event, a new record has been set this year. The success of these two events underlines both the strong benefits arising from EASP and SPA collaboration and the strength of the ties between the two organisations.
As host, the University of York was delighted to see two colleagues strongly connected to York honoured during the event, with Zoë Iriving (Emeritus Professor, York) receiving the SPA’s Outstanding Achievement in Social Policy Award and York Social Policy & Social Work PhD alumnus Bo Yung Kim (Yeungnam University) announced as the new EASP Chair.
Next year, EASP and SPA will go their own way for their annual conferences. York hands the conference organisation baton to Liverpool Hope University (SPA) and, for the EASP, to a Hong Kong collaboration led by The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Elizabeth Cookingham Bailey, John Hudson, Enrico Reuter, Antonios Roumpakis, University of York (EASP – SPA 2025 Conference Organising Committee)