Stepping-stone solidarity: The normative foundation of the social investment welfare state

In this article, we explore the normative foundations of the social investment welfare state. Social investment welfare enhances ex ante individuals’ opportunities and capabilities to resolve the social risks typical of post-industrial societies – via early childhood education and care, vocational training over the life course, active-labour-market capacity-building and policies for work-life balance, such as paid parental leave, lifelong learning and long-term care. Social investment transcends, while not replacing, the compensatory rationale of mid-20th-century social security. We begin by lamenting the prolonged disconnect between social policy research and normative political theory since the 1990s, which is worrisome against the background of significant welfare state change. We address the shortcomings of a purely Rawlsian-distributive reconstruction of the social investment policy turn, while rejecting the ‘luck egalitarian’ interpretation and its tacit conflation with Third Way welfare reform. Our normative framework for social investment takes heed of Elizabeth Anderson's relational understanding of justice and work by Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit on ‘secure’ capabilities and ‘fertile’ functionings, which builds on Amartya Sen's critique of John Rawls. Finally, we delineate our concept of stepping-stone solidarity as the normative anchor of social investment welfare.