On the limits of social services intervention

Abstract

One of the most common arguments in justifying the scant impact of social services is their lack of relative weight in social expenditure as a whole. This article shows that such an explanation may not be entirely true. Despite its early years being clearly positive on balance, an analysis of certain data from the 1997-2007 pre-crisis period shows, in the author’s review, the increasing difficulties in improving situations of poverty and social exclusion, regardless of the financial and human means available. Such affirmation suggests the possibility that social services intervention is subject to certain limits that seriously constrain its capacities, implying the need to integrate them in our discourse. Its foundations would be the irrevocable epoch change that we are experiencing, the unsustainability of the incremental welfare model on which social intervention was based, and an idea of the finite nature of social action that integrates the reflections in this respect of Marx (1992) and Nussbaum (1995). The text concludes with a brief section describing the meaning of such limits on social services as threshold, transfer and transformation.