Introduction

Overall, children in the UK are at greater risk of living in poverty than other age groups such as pensioners and working-age adults, yet they are not equally exposed to poverty risk. Children in large families, those in single-parent households and those from minority ethnic households are consistently among the most at risk of poverty (Cooper and Hills, 2021; Vizard et al, 2023). That minority ethnic children are over-represented among children in poverty is well cited, and the drivers are often linked to parental labour market outcomes, racial discrimination, different cultural norms among families, as well as the inaccessibility of welfare services for different minority groups (Lister, 2021). Yet, as Lister (2021: 80) argues, the racial patterning of child poverty and the particular vulnerabilities of some children, including refugee and asylum-seeking, children are too often overlooked. This can be extended to other children in migrant families who are not fleeing war and persecution but who are affected by similar challenges, including exclusion from mainstream social security structures which in the UK context is referred to as ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) restrictions.

Increasingly, research has documented the experiences of destitution and poverty among children and families living in the UK who are restricted from accessing state support due to immigration policies (Dexter et al, 2016; Dickson, 2019; Pinter et al, 2020; Jolly et al, 2022). Immigration policy and legislation make explicit that most migrants and their dependents who come to the UK should be excluded from accessing income-based benefits, including those targeting children in families living on low income, and regardless of need. This is a form of structural inequality which overwhelmingly affects children from minority ethnic households. Some of those experiencing deep, persistent poverty include thousands of children from Black and Asian families who were born in the UK or are themselves British citizens (Woolley, 2019) but whose parents migrated here largely from former British colonies (Pinter et al, 2020). Although there are significant data gaps, analysis shows that migrants are generally at a higher risk of living in poverty than those born in the UK and the gap is greater for children (Hughes and Kenway, 2016; Vizard et al, 2023).

Introduction

If you were trying to characterise developments in social policy in recent years, the chances are that you might select a series of key events and trends to define the attitudes of policy makers and political narratives. The list might include the febrile Brexit debate regarding controlling our borders (HM Government, 2018), the Grenfell Tower tragedy (Davies et al, 2017), the Black Lives Matter movement (Dray, 2021), COVID-19 (Nazroo and Becares, 2021), continued welfare retrenchment (Edmiston and Thakkar, 2021) and the Windrush scandal (Williams, 2020) partly inspired by Theresa May's ‘hostile environment’ (EHRC, 2020) as an intent to delineate between citizens and aliens. While the inventory might not be definitive, these events would feature on many people's lists. At the heart of this list lies the portrayal of a modern Britain as increasingly divided and polarised, not just across class and income lines but also in terms of race and ethnicity.

At the heart of the Brexit debate, one of the most divisive periods of British politics, was the vision of a Britain that had become lost in a ‘global hegemon of the capitalist world economy’ and a ‘deep-rooted nostalgia for the British imperial project’ (Virdee and McGeever, 2018: 1805, 1809) where racisms continue to be a part of British values (Patel and Connelly, 2019). While the creation of a ‘hostile environment’ may have begun as a statement of intent to tackle illegal immigration, it says a great deal about British political narrative that it so easily spread to include a problematisation of immigration in general. The fact that the term ‘hostile environment’ is not formally included in white papers nor in policy documents (Griffiths and Yeo, 2021) illustrates the potentially nebulous nature of the concept. Furthermore, an intersectionality of race and class is demonstrated in the fact that most of the Grenfell Tower fatalities were of minority ethnic people, and the way in which COVID-19 has disproportionately affected the Black and minoritised population (Otu et al, 2020; Nazroo and Becares, 2021).

With this in mind, it might be presumed that race and ethnicity are key elements within a discipline such as Social Policy, which has a rich history of studying and analysing inequality.

Introduction

The previous chapter suggested that citizenship refers to a status which brings with it certain rights and duties. At its core, the conceptualisation of citizenship recognises Lewis's (1998: 104) suggestion of three relevant elements of citizenship intimately connected to social welfare provision:

• 1. citizenship provides a way of recognising the link between the state and the individual;

• 2. citizenship implies membership in a community, which in turn highlights inclusion and exclusion criteria; and

• 3. citizenship is a social status that allows people to make a claim against state services.

Furthermore, as noted in the previous chapter, it also incorporates the suggestion by Dean and Melrose (1999) that citizenship has been presented as a ‘totalising’ concept, often gender neutral, essentially universal and ahistorical. Citizenship, especially within the UK context, has developed a particular masculine, White, able-bodied and heterosexual assumption about citizens which obscures the broader diversity of citizens. While this chapter does not seek to be comprehensive in scope, it focuses on the tension between welfare provision and diverse citizens within the UK. As such, attention is given to the implicit, and often explicit, framing of citizenship within social policies, in order to problematise citizen interaction with state support and administration which follows in the later chapters. Complementing sources that contextualise broader philosophical debates (see Faulks, 2000; Lister, 2010, 2020; Dwyer, 2010; Edmiston, 2018), this chapter provides detail on the historical development of citizenship as a concept to underpin subsequent discussion in this book.

As such, this chapter sets out the emergence of imagined communities which have played a central role in the formation of citizenship and the limitations and rearticulations of citizenship which can be drawn out of theorisation and debate regarding citizenship. We give credence to Hoffman's (2004) suggestion that citizenship is a momentum concept: an ever-unfolding and ever-changing term that is reworked towards increasingly progressive ends. Illustrating the benefits of this momentum concept, subsequent chapters in this book draw out research insights across a diverse range of citizens’ engagement with various aspects of the welfare state.

Introduction

Though graduates of UK universities have what is considered to be a life-long ‘graduate premium’ (Kemp-King, 2016) consisting of higher earnings and increased potential for upward social mobility than non-graduates, this does not protect all graduates from hardship. This chapter examines the diversity in trajectories of recent graduates in the UK through exploring the narratives of 15 working-class women who graduated from their undergraduate courses in 2013. The analysis draws on a dataset of 79 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2012 and 2017.

The chapter argues that while some working-class women graduates achieve upward social mobility as a result of attending higher education (HE), securing this upward trajectory requires far more than a university degree. Economic capital as well as ‘valuable’ cultural and social capital are required, and the most privileged are more likely to have access to these capitals, as well as the knowledge on how to mobilise them in order to find professional employment. This ‘game’, characterised by the intense hypermobilisation of capitals, takes place within a landscape that has become increasingly hostile and harmful to working-class people since the turn of the century. Austerity programmes have ravaged ‘left behind areas’ and welfare provision, leaving in their wake reduced employment prospects for some young people and an increase in the debts that they carry, as well as little in the way of a ‘safety net’. Further, the growth in insecure employment has made the lives of some working-class groups precarious. Graduates are not immune to these conditions, as the narratives presented in this chapter show.

This work demonstrates how young working-class women graduates operate within this landscape, strategise to cultivate distinctive curricula vitae (CVs) and become upwardly socially mobile. It explores too how they negotiate access to the welfare state, navigate the gig economy, precarious working conditions and economic hardship post-graduation. Before data are presented, literature on widening participation, graduate employment and the welfare state is examined. First, the policy and political context in which these women accessed university and the labour market is considered.

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of key policy debates, supported by examples from research, relating to how long-term sick and disabled people1 are treated when they require financial support from the state. The concept of (un)deservingness in social policies for disabled people will be considered. This is not a new notion, and so the historical background will also be discussed. The chapter then moves on to consider the major changes to UK ‘welfare’ policy directed towards the long-term sick and disabled during the 21st century and to contextualise these within the challenges of ‘austerity’. This will be examined particularly through the lens of local authority funding and COVID-19. The main body of the chapter considers the impact of the current system of benefits on claimants from my research with benefit claimants, and then introduces literature based on more recent research. Following this, I present an account of my lived experience as a disabled benefit claimant. In reporting my own experience, I hope to highlight the fact that, regardless of my privileged position as a highly educated White academic, it is still impossible to escape the stigmatising rhetoric which permeates through interactions with the UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The chapter concludes that, at the time of writing in 2021, disability-related benefits in the UK continued to be framed within the context of ‘scroungers and shirkers’. To make society fairer, and to support disabled people to live more fulfilling lives with suitable occupational roles (both paid and unpaid) there is an urgent need for change. This does not appear to be forthcoming in the DWP's 2021 Green Paper on disability benefits, and although the accompanying White Paper is due, this has not been forthcoming at the time of writing.

Social policy context: how many ways can a government say ‘undeserving’?

The myth of the lazy working-class individual who does not want to work is one that has persisted over centuries. The language and policy landscape may change, but the discourse consistently holds true for those who are unemployed (Grant, 2019) or viewed as undeserving. Considering the case of the UK, debates moved significantly from the ‘scroungermania’ of the Thatcher era (Moore, 1981),

Introduction

The year 2020 has come to signify one of the key moments in UK race relations for two reasons; firstly, the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionally impacted on racialised communities in the UK, as this population was more likely to be infected and suffer deaths from the virus (Public Health England, 2020). Secondly, the horrific killing of George Floyd in the US fuelled global #BlackLivesMatter protests across the world, including in the UK, demanding that urgent attention is paid to the societal structures that are literally and figuratively killing racialised communities in the UK. It is therefore crucial that UK social policy, which seeks to respond to the societal challenge of inequalities, has an explicit focus on how racial structures prevent or minimise opportunities for racially minoritised1 (RM) people to benefit from social policies.

This chapter will examine how the institutional arrangements of welfare services delivery can (re)produce racial inequalities. Beveridge envisioned that the provision of welfare would be concerned with meeting needs by providing services and benefits for all rather than seeking provision on a selective basis (Lewis, 1996). However, he conceived the persons who would need social services to be ‘male, married, with family responsibilities and White’ (Williams in O’Brien, 2010: 33). Beveridge's legacy in the construction of public social services has shaped the contemporary design and delivery of these services, which is centred on the ‘universal’ notion of need.

Using the case of Universal Credit (UC), the dual objective of this chapter is to put forward theoretical arguments that racialised institutions are present in welfare services delivery and to suggest the types of institutions that could be formed. Institutions in this chapter denotes the ‘combination of formal rules (including structures and processes) and informal conventions (established and routinised practices): this is what Elinor Ostrom (1999) refers to as “rules-in-use” … Such configurations of rules are backed up by customary narratives, which elaborate the underpinning ideas – the “reasons why” institutions operate as they do’ (cited by Lowndes and Lempriere, 2018: 227– 228). This chapter puts forward arguments derived from an institutionalist perspective which shows that the ‘rules-in-use’ in the UK welfare state has a legacy of marginalising RM people.

Introduction

The Office for National Statistics (2020) reported that an estimated 1.6 million women and 757,000 men had reported domestic abuse in the UK for the 12 month period ending March 2020. While much of the public reporting of domestic abuse highlights the harm caused to women, it overlooks the analysis that one third of reports feature a male victim.

This chapter explores the experiences of men seeking medical attention following domestic abuse, and the way in which these experiences affect their feelings of empowerment to report their perpetrators. The chapter considers how they navigate their experiences within the healthcare services in the UK. It also reflects on whether healthcare professionals are provided with adequate awareness training to identify and support male victims of domestic abuse and whether there has been a failure of service provision, placing male victims back in harm's way. Drijber et al (2013) recognised that there was limited knowledge of supporting male victims, and it can be argued that progress since their research has been similarly limited. ManKind Initiative (2017), a UK male domestic abuse support charity, reported only 78 refuge spaces for male domestic abuse victims across the UK, prompting consideration whether the gaps are being adequately addressed to support victims.

Many men do not report their abuse, due to stigma, shame and fear of being disbelieved (Dobash and Dobash, 2004; Morgan et al, 2014; Myhill, 2017; Hope et al, 2021). This chapter highlights that men can be the victims of domestic abuse, and that they need support provision to be in place, as demand for services is increasing. However, this is not the whole picture, as many men do not report; therefore, statistics will never be, and are failing to provide, an accurate representation of the issue.

Informing this chapter is research examining the experiences of the male victims of female perpetrators when seeking medical attention, and the extent to which victims felt they were provided adequate support and/or encouraged to report their abuse. To access the participants, an online questionnaire was developed with 22 questions and made accessible via ManKind Initiative, a leading domestic abuse charity based in the UK and at the forefront of supporting male victims of domestic abuse.

Famously, at the start of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, Marx observed ‘all that is solid melts into air’. While many may criticise some elements of the Manifesto, or even disagree with the underpinning sentiments, few can argue with Marx's observation that our social, political and economic worlds are in constant change. It is tempting to think of welfare as having a monolithic permanence within our world that is ever-present and unchanging. However, this book further reinforces the fact that welfare is an ever-changing entity that is shaped by the political vagaries of governments and has at many times been used as a method of gaining political capital. In this respect, welfare has been shown to focus on meeting the needs we cannot meet ourselves, such as health, housing, social care and education. However, this also goes beyond the boundaries of personal benefits to also recognise the social benefits of welfare and the social outcomes of citizenship and inclusion.

Similarly, the book has demonstrated the changing nature of society and our social relations. We live in a time when there is increasing awareness of diversity within society, whether that be in terms of gender, sexuality, ‘race’, disability, lifestyle or heritage. This is not to say that such factors and choices are new, in fact quite the opposite. However, what is interesting about this book is that the themes covered reflect a post-industrial representation of diversity and, in doing so, a new canvas upon which economic and social exclusion are portrayed. We find ourselves in an age when such diversity is more recognised and, on the surface, more accepted. It is unlikely that this book would have been written in this way 20 or 30 years ago.

In recognising a post-industrial social diversity, the book has afforded an opportunity to pause and consider the extent to which such diversity is genuinely accepted, let alone celebrated. Contemporary Western society is often presented as one of equality and tolerance, implicitly inferring acceptance and even the legal protection of diversity. And yet, the preceding chapters have begun to challenge the reality of this assumption, a view that is supported in increasing levels of reported hate crime. With the annual data published each March, the number of hate crimes has increased from 42,225 in 2013 to 155,841 in 2022.

Citizenship is closely tied to welfare reforms, providing access to various protections and promoting a sense of unity, social justice and equality in order to enhance state welfare provisions. This establishes citizenship as a crucial element enabling individuals to claim protection from the state against collective harms, which are often rooted in industrialisation and societal changes. Citizenship has become an increasingly contested concept. The term can invoke a sense of belonging to a particular community, a particular society as an equal member, and entitlement to the rights and protections that come with being a ‘citizen’. It is associated with a system of legal, political and social practices that offer a series of rights, protections and forms of support and redress that can be, and often are, denied to noncitizens. It can also be considered as participatory, including the acts through which we claim citizenship status. Fundamentally, much welfare provision is predicated upon the status of being a citizen, the social rights this confers and the access to welfare support that ensues.

For the starting point of this book and its study of welfare, citizenship can be understood as a way of defining belonging and, by default, a way of defining the characteristics which shape inclusion and exclusion. Although Chapter 2 will examine the concept in more detail, for now the term can be considered crudely not only in terms of nationality, but also in more nuanced social terms of ‘playing by the rules’ and maintaining ‘British values’. As the discussion will demonstrate through the account of citizenship theory and substantive chapters, such a view of citizenship is limited and problematic. It incorporates implicit assumptions and biases through its universal framing. As such, the universal notion of citizenship which helped to justify state intervention through welfare support has been seen to erase the broader diversity that significantly shapes individuals’ lives and their access to welfare support (Bhambra, 2015: 102). Welfare policies have historically made assumptions about who should receive support, such as the role of women in the family and the exclusion of people of colour from emerging welfare provisions. Prevailing societal institutions have internalised and normalised conventions that disadvantage women and racial minorities, even if they are not explicitly codified in statutes (Meer, 2020: 11).

Introduction

This chapter addresses the role that social class has played in shaping societal responses to austerity post 2010. We discuss the rise of neoliberalism as a free market and small welfare state approach that has driven divisions across society, separating the deserving from the undeserving, resulting in a rise of precarity and food insecurity for many. Structurally, this chapter examines the Equality Act 2010, one of the final, yet crucially significant policies of the New Labour government, and challenges the absence of ‘working class’ as a protected characteristic. Doing so, this chapter locates its arguments within Guy Standings’ (2011) framework of the precariat, a new social class, distinctively separate from any other that has gone before. Moreover, this chapter is about neoliberalism and its associations with division, austerity and the creation of the precariat in the UK. Here we exemplify this through a discussion of class structure, identity and food poverty.

The first part of this chapter will establish the theoretical framework which sits over our discussion, notably that of Bourdieusian habitus (1984) and authenticated links to Standing's (2011) precariat.

Following this, we will explain what we mean by the umbrella term neoliberalism, with examples of how this approach has determined policy in practically all areas of the UK, notably the Equality Act 2010. Here, in line with Standing (2011), neoliberalism is discussed as the main cause of social division and precarity, coexisting with a sense of dispossession and disqualification. We then identify how the state of neoliberalism has become normalised for many ordinary families and working people and exists within a backdrop of populist political narratives. These narratives work to reposition the working-class identity as simply a non-identity; one that is envisaged as an economic category linked to a lowering of socioeconomic status.

Standing (2011) has posited that the loss of a working-class identity has left the working class as now reflective of little more than an evocative label. We believe it is important to present a broad view of neoliberalism so that the reader understands how extensive its reach has been in society since at least the 1980s and how it has influenced and determined social policies throughout the subsequent years.

Introduction

Welfare support can play a vital role in creating conditions for disabled people to enter and remain in work through self-employment and entrepreneurship. Social security schemes are key mechanisms for promoting and supporting ‘inclusive entrepreneurship’ (OECD/European Union, 2019) – that is, when all are given an opportunity to start and run a business – by providing financial and non-financial assistance to people who face additional risks or uncertainties (Kitching, 2014). For example, complete financial independence from welfare may be unachievable for some entrepreneurs with severe impairments or fluctuating conditions (Kašperová and Kitching, 2021). Yet, the role of welfare support in facilitating inclusive entrepreneurship is largely under-studied.

Although entrepreneurship has been encouraged by successive UK governments in addressing unemployment and social exclusion (Rouse and Jayawarna, 2011; Xheneti, 2021), policies seeking to increase the quantity and quality of enterprise among disadvantaged and under-represented groups have generated relatively modest results (Arshed et al, 2019). It is believed that such policies have even perpetuated welfare dependency (Smith et al, 2018), as this chapter refers, possibly because of failure to provide adequate investment to deal with the underlying barriers faced by socially excluded groups (Rouse and Jayawarna, 2011).

There has been a significant increase in non-traditional forms of work, particularly solo self-employment, both in the UK (Giupponi and Xu, 2020) and elsewhere (OECD, 2019). Much of this increase has been described as ‘false self-employment’ driven by the on-demand or gig economy (Gregory, 2017). The gig economy is believed to have generated a class of low-paid self-employed, many of whom rely on social security for survival, prompting questions about whether self-employment is a viable route into decent work (Williams and Lapeyre, 2017). These developments bring into question the role of the welfare state in supporting the growing number of vulnerable self-employed (IPSE, 2019). This is particularly pertinent considering the impact of COVID-19 on self-employed people and small business owners, many of whom have relied on Universal Credit and other state-backed financial support schemes for survival (Rouse et al, 2020).

Introduction

‘The first option I was offered … was to go into [a high support, predominantly male hostel] … I had literally just started hormones at that point, I don't want to be with traumatised men, looking like I do right now. “Oh, do you want to go to a woman's shelter?” and I said, “No, that's not really appropriate either. Because I’m gonna be growing a beard and my voice is going to be dropping.” There's so much stuff in the press about people in sex-based spaces. That was something that was playing on my mind, if I went into a woman's shelter, am I going to end up on the front pages of the Daily Mail, like. I was really terrified.’

This chapter reports upon findings from interviews with Welsh trans people,1 drawing on one of the largest studies of trans people's experiences of homelessness to date (see England, 2021, 2022a). In the opening extract, Daniel (he), a young trans man, describes a common experience among participants: after becoming homeless, and seeking help, he approached services, but found that the options available to him were limited and did not adequately meet his needs as a trans man, because they were organised around a heteronormative understanding of gender. Denying Daniel the early intervention that is well understood to be critical in preventing repeated and cyclical homelessness (Fitzpatrick et al, 2021) represented a missed opportunity to avert, for him, the repeated and long-term homelessness that is common among trans people as a group – nearly a quarter of trans people will experience homelessness during their lifetime, reflecting high prevalence of poverty, employment and housing discrimination, physical and mental ill health and compromised access to medical care (Reck, 2009; Spicer, 2010; Shelton, 2016; Kattari and Begun, 2017; Bachman and Gooch, 2018; Ecker et al, 2019; Wilson et al, 2020; England, 2021). This is especially important, given a growing awareness that LGBTQ+ people as a group have specific needs in terms of avoiding, resolving and surviving homelessness (Albert Kennedy Trust, 2018; Ecker et al, 2019; Matthews et al, 2019) – for instance, the main study on which this chapter draws additionally identified relationship breakdown as a key vector into homelessness and, to a lesser extent, familial rejection (England, 2022b).

Decoupling

Decoupling is one of several ways in which organisations might resist (or not) external, so-called ‘institutional’ pressures to be and act in a certain way (see, for example, Coburn, 2004), with other possibilities ranging from enthusiastic adoption, through grudging acceptance and avoidance, to refusal. In this spectrum, decoupling is a form of avoidance. It originated as a mechanism to explain lack of intra-organisational change in the literatures on institutional theory, with landmark contributions from, among others, Weick (1976) and Meyer and Rowan (1977). Weick (1976) pointed out that rational theories of change in organisations, including schools, often fail to account for what actually happens there and what might motivate it. Weick (1976) subsequently developed the notion of ‘loose coupling’ to indicate the ways in which ‘coupled events are responsive, but that each event also preserves its own identity and some evidence of its physical or logical separateness’ (p 3).

Meyer and Rowan (1977) built on Weick's (1976) insight by suggesting that a binary exists between those two elements of an organisation that are most often loosely coupled or decoupled. The first element consists of the organisation's structures, which grow to reflect the demands of the environment or what Meyer and Rowan (1977) call the ‘institutional rules’ (p 340) where institutional refers to beyond the organisation. These rules ‘function as myths which organisations incorporate, gaining legitimacy, resources, stability, and enhanced survival prospects’ (Meyer and Rowan, 1977, p 340). (In other framings, these institutional rules would constitute the policy landscape to be resisted, accommodated or embraced). The second element, decoupled from the first, consists of the technical realm of routine work activities within the organisation, which may operate according to quite different logics or imperatives. This means that ‘conformity to institutionalised rules could promote the long-term survival of the organisation without necessarily increasing its efficiency or technical performance’ (Oplatka, 2004, p 149).

Taking up this analytic in relation to education, Oplatka (2004) notes that ‘one aspect of schools’ conformity to socially legitimated changes and innovations is that their organisational structure and processes mirror the norms, values, and ideologies institutionalised in society’ (p 148). In many states and jurisdictions internationally, these ideologies contemporarily will be largely grounded in market-based logics.

Implementation

Policy implementation ‘may refer to anything meant to happen after an intention or aspiration has been expressed’ (Hupe, 2014, p 166). However, it has largely been constructed in the sub-field of implementation studies as having certain common features. These include a rejection, or under-emphasising, of the role of theory; an assumption of rationality in the actors involved; a strict conceptual division of labour between policy makers at the ‘top’ and implementers at the ‘bottom’; a reliance on a technical interpretation of the mechanisms of implementation; and an understanding of the relationship between the elements in a causal chain as linear and direct. Implementation in this positivist perspective is amenable to being rendered as broad-brush diagrammatic models comprising, for instance, wheels, cycles or one of the latter in a series of sequential or perceived causal stages.

Such simplistic models cannot capture the complexity of the social and political interactions involved in policy processes. Neither can the conceptual and theoretical tools used in most implementation studies satisfactorily explain how policy ‘gets done’. Consequently, the sub-field, which emerged following Pressman and Wildavsky's (1973) landmark publication, is characterised by disputes. For instance, the field engaged in a long-lasting debate regarding whether policy implementation should be seen as ‘top-down’ or ‘bottomup’. A ‘top-down’ perspective is concerned with how faithfully, effectively and efficiently a policy is translated into practice from the hierarchical apex, where it is formulated, to the chalkface, and by which mechanisms. Any deviations from the original policy intention are problematised and the implementer blamed for them. Concomitantly, the values and actions of the policy maker are accepted uncritically and adopted as the starting point of the implementation study. Hupe (2014) describes ‘mainstream implementation studies’ (p 170) as typically ‘top-down’ and tending to be explored through single case studies. ‘Bottom-up’ implementation studies are concerned, on the other hand, with the motivations, experiences and actions of those who are meant to be doing the implementing. These actors are characterised by Lipsky (1980) as ‘street-level bureaucrats’. Far from wilful non-compliance, bottomup studies demonstrated the diverse influences on actors as they engage with policy.