ABSTRACT
Disability support systems in many advanced capitalist countries have undergone significant changes in contexts of rapid neoliberalisation. Services that were once provided or commissioned by governments are now increasingly arranged through various forms of ‘individualised funding’ (IF), allocated to individuals or families to enable them to choose the services they use from a mixed market of disability service providers. In this introductory chapter, I pose two key questions: first, what is driving the proliferation of IF regimes globally; and second, what accounts for the differences and similarities evident in the English, Scottish and Australian systems of IF? I argue that a lacuna exists in the critical policy literature regarding the historically and geographically specific ways in which IF policies have been mobilised in and across different countries, as part of a global process of neoliberal state restructuring. I propose a new theoretical framework for the study of IF drawing on the emerging field of policy mobilities research and outline what my research methodology of ‘following the policy’ involved in the context of this study. I show how the policy mobilities approach attempts to navigate some middle way between structuralist and agent-centric approaches, foreshadowing the approach I develop and apply in this book.
