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The threat to welfare societies posed by population ageing has urged high‐income countries to rethink the provision of social and healthcare services for the ageing population. One widely implemented policy solution is ‘reablement’: short‐term home‐based training programmes focusing on re‐enabling older people to carry out activities of daily living independently. Drawing on empirical material from multisited ethnographic fieldwork of reablement practices in a Danish municipality we explore how the assumptions about independence embedded in the concept's linguistic parts – ‘re’, ‘able’ and ‘ment’ – map onto lives characterised by functional decline. We find that home care applicants: (i) are often too deeply dependent on the capacities of others in order to have their independence restored; (ii) negotiate individual meanings of independence to maintain their identity as able human beings; and (iii) might possibly gain new capacities through reablement, yet these are not individual and stable achievements, but rather temporary effects of the care relations with eldercare professionals. Rather than reablement we, therefore, suggest the term ‘enabling arrangements’ as more appropriate for capturing independence as a distributed, negotiated and continuous accomplishment. Finally, we discuss the practical and ethical implications of this term.

In the face of population ageing, Western health-care systems are currently demonstrating an immense interest in mobilising older people's potentials. With this agenda in mind, several countries have introduced reablement: a type of home care aimed at mobilising older people's potentials for independence by means of short-term training programmes. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Denmark's home care sector, this paper explores how elder-care professionals translate the abstract notion of ‘potentiality’ into practice. Theoretically, the paper draws on Annemarie Mol's term ‘logic of care’. I demonstrate that professionals draw on two co-existing logics of care: a logic of reablement encapsulating ideals of successful ageing and life-long development; and a logic of retirement, which in contrast allows people at the end of life to retreat and engage in enjoyable activities. Professionals manage to balance these logics in order to live up to policy obligations while at the same time complying with moral standards of good care. However, very little is achieved in terms of increased independence. I argue that by narrowly focusing on bodily and quantifiable potentials, the ‘potentiality paradigm’ holds the risk of deeming older people to lack potential. In conclusion, I therefore encourage a more inclusive approach to elder-care and ageing that recognises the complexities of ageing, including older people's potentials for retreat and leisure.

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