ABSTRACT
Welfare refers both to the health, happiness, and fortunes of a person or group and to the actions or procedures designed to promote the basic and material wellbeing of people in need.1 These procedures can include transfer payments to those unable to work and the guaranteed provision of certain essential elements of a ‘decent’ standard of living, like health care, and education. The organisation of welfare in capitalist societies is complex and multi-faceted. People derive their welfare from a range of institutions and sites, so that the organisation of welfare involves labour markets, families, voluntary and state agencies, charities, and so on (O’Brien and Penna, 1998). However with the rise of liberalism and citizenship rights, came an incremental separation of public and private spheres, thus changing the discourses regarding the ‘right place’ for women as carers (Isin and Wood, 1999). This chapter examines the historical evolution of welfare itself as a concept and how this change came about. It also highlights some of the different models of welfare provision and how carers themselves fit in, or ‘are targeted’ by these different models of welfare. Key to this is the idea of citizenship, and a country’s understanding of it. As part of exploring welfare, the chapter also focuses on the geographical issues of welfare, such as allocation, access, and utility.
