Governing Risky Childhoods: How Neoliberal Governance Prescriptions Rule out Social Rights

When associating the rise of neoliberalism with the waning of social rights of citizenship, scholars point to two mechanisms. First, neoliberal ideology posits a model of self-sufficient citizenship that targets entitlement for producing dependency and undermining individual responsibility and morality. Second, the enforcement of neoliberal austerity constrains public expenditure and stimulates re-commodification via cutbacks of social benefits. This article proposes an understudied third mechanism: the role of neoliberal governance prescriptions in rejecting and replacing the mechanisms that produce social rights. Discarding the notion of neoliberalism as an antithesis to state intervention, the article calls attention to neoliberalism’s capacity to design new types of state activity and social consequences by establishing state apparatuses based on organizational principles and institutional logics that draw on private sector management and market behavior. To substantiate this argument, the article probes the development of competing modes of governing the mounting social problem of children and families in risk in Israel (1990-2008): first, the rise and fall of a social rights act (2000-2002), and then the gradual development and implementation of a new public management (NPM)- inspired model (2003-2008). In its role as an instruction sheet for responsible and efficient governance, neoliberalism challenges, disqualifies, and replaces the mechanisms on which the production of social rights depends. While the neoliberal governance model produces and legitimizes economically efficient local administration of services, it is fragile from the standpoint of social citizenship.