OVERHAULING RUSSIA'S CHILD WELFARE SYSTEM: INSTITUTIONAL AND IDEATIONAL FACTORS BEHIND THE PARADIGM SHIFTThis article studies the causal factors behind the major overhaul of Russia's system for children in substitute care that has been taking place since the late 2000's. A series of reforms have promoted fostering and family-like care in contrast to the large residential homes used in the Soviet period and 1990's. We highlight the fundamental change in the 'ideal of care' represented by the move to 'deinstitutionalise' the care system by promoting domestic adoptions, increasing the number of foster families, creating early support services for families as well as restructuring remaining residential institutions into smaller, home-like environments. These are all key elements of the global deinstitutionalisation trend that is taking place around the globe. We look at the evolution of the related policies and ask why this policy shift happened during the 2010's even though the issue of reform had partially been on the Russian policy agenda for some time. Building on an explanatory approach to family policy changes by Magritta Mäztke and Ilona Ostner, which incorporates material and ideational driving forces, we explain that the 'political will from above' behind these major reforms was shaped by a range of other societal and political factors. instance, the increasing conservative turn in policies towards children and families, which are driven by the severe demographic decline in the country, work alongside the influence of international norms around children's rights and changing socio-economic circumstances. In the 1990's Russian NGOs had considerable input into the reforms as 'epistemic communities' in policy formation thanks to the high level of expertise that they developed in international networks and the increasing number of cross-sector consultative platforms at governmental bodies in contemporary Russia. We conclude that ideational factors were necessary preconditions for the reforms, but that political forces were ultimately the key driving force. The recentralisation of power and prioritisation of social policy under President Putin allowed new ideas to gain concrete policy realisation.
Coming at the cusp of 20 years of social work training in Russia, this article analyses why education in universities is still so disconnected from the field of social work practice. Our attention focuses on institutional dynamics that shape the national regulation of social work education, limited practice content in curricula and the mixed impact of international co-operation. The research highlights that achieving broad agreement on the need for practice skills, service user prioritization and a strong values base must be the key focus when developing training in contexts where social work is relatively new.
This paper explores the silence surrounding disabled people's sexuality in contemporary, postsocialist Bulgaria. The related desexualisation of disabled people is regarded as an instance of disablism that is sustained through medicalisation, patriarchal stereotypes and negative understandings of the bodily difference of 'impairment'. The analysis draws on disability studies and phenomenology in order to elicit the workings of these mechanisms in everyday discourse as represented by an autobiographical essay and an internet discussion. A number of strategies for challenging disablist desexualisation are also highlighted whose point of departure is breaking the silence on the topic of disabled people's sexuality.2 BackgroundSince the fall of the state socialist regime in 1989, Bulgaria has experienced a turbulent 'transition' from centrally planned towards free market economy and from one-party rule towards parliamentary democracy. This transformation has been accompanied by a number of significant social and cultural changes, but also by a number of continuities. The new order ostensibly undermined all kinds of boundariesnational, ideological, cultural.Travelling abroad became easier and people gained unprecedented access to previously scarce or explicitly forbidden cultural resources, a process that has been greatly enhanced by the internet since the mid-1990s. Neverthelessor probably precisely as a reaction to such disorienting opennessnegative attitudes towards difference along major sociocultural axes like ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and disability have remained relatively stable. Public discussion on such issues was largely silenced during the state socialist period, when the problems of difference were expected to automatically wither away with the abolition of class exploitation. They did not disappear, 1 but neither did they dissolve with the development of the free market and parliamentary democracy after 1989.The results of recent sociological studies strongly suggest that 'at the moment in Bulgaria (and to a different but approximating degree in all postsocialist countries) many real problems exist in relation to the perception and approach towards difference' (Tomova, 2009: 120).
Social policy is a vital dimension of well-being in the harsh conditions of the Russian Far North. This article examines how longstanding welfare provision in the region has been restructured within the context of nationwide social reforms under Vladimir Putin. It starts with an analysis of Soviet-era policies for northern inhabitants and their evolution during the socio-economic crisis of the 1990s. I then look at how recent changes to budgetary and federal relations in the country have affected the delivery of social assistance in the North. Ultimately, the neoliberal undertones exhibited in federal social policy may be inappropriate in the region, where markets and individuals cannot be expected to sustain well-being
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