ABSTRACT
Throughout the western world, family-based foster care is facing similar challenges, to which most governments are responding in broadly similar ways. Among the most important of these challenges are declining numbers of carers coupled with growing numbers of children who are displaying more serious and intractable problems than was the case even a decade or so ago. In the USA, Britain and Australia, one predictable response to the crisis has been ‘outsourcing’ or devolution of the foster care system to nongovernment agencies operating under contract to government. In this chapter we describe how these factors came together in South Australia just as our research was getting under way. Because it sets out the policy context of our work, this chapter helps to explain many of the issues and problems our work uncovered. Although the details of this outline are necessarily limited to Australia, readers from North America, Britain and continental Europe will no doubt recognize many of the issues within their own countries.
