Policies Against Poverty in Russia – A Female Responsibility

Abstract

This article analyses how social policies in Russia can give poor people opportunities to improve their life situations given the persisting norms of a moral and practical female responsibility for social welfare. Women working in the social sphere have created their own support networks for helping people to take part in state programmes and to become entitled to support in one way or the other. Their agenda is clearly larger than the directives they might be subject to from above. They use relations to create resources. Analysing the agency of women who are professionally working in the social sphere supports distinguishing their potential roles of empowering the poor from their controlling roles. Empirical data are based on qualitative interviews with social work experts, social workers, social pedagogues at schools, teachers, doctor's assistants, local politicians and deputies of commissions or local village councils in two Russian regions.

The Politics of Poverty in Contemporary Russia

“…Social mothers' ability to promote welfare development thus depends on their capacity to transform whatever income or assets they have into useful necessities for the poor. As a result of the low priority given to femaledominated sectors in state policy, women have had to develop entrepreneurial skills, and these skills have survived after the Soviet system (Sätre 2014b;. Women use them in their formal positions as responsible for social policy and in informal positions, when taking responsibility voluntarily in social work.…”

Women’s entrepreneurship in Russia: impacts from the Soviet system

“…Here, we find the survival of entrepreneurial behaviour dealing with shortcomings resulting from the low-priority status of social issues in the Soviet system. Data from both Archangelsk and Nizhegorodskaya Oblast show that such shortcomings were solved by women's horizontally organized informal networks of mutual support or care (Sätre, 2014b).…”

“…Although social policy partly continues to be financed by the state, it is organized in a new way. It is indicated that women who are responsible for social welfare have to find sponsors by themselves, for their regular activities (Sätre, 2014b(Sätre, , 2014c. Being responsible for organizing social welfare, women working in the social sphere have created their own support networks for this.…”

“…They use relations to create resources. Their agenda might be unclear, and it is clearly larger than the directives they might be subject to from above (Sätre, 2014b). They are also actively working to increase available resources by for example applying for projects, striving to participate in state programs and collecting charity (Sätre, 2014c).…”