Introduction

The role of geographical area or place has long been central to some social policy strategies, initiatives and tensions. When considering governmental interventions, there are perhaps three main approaches to note:

• • targeted reforms and investments in schools, health services and transport facilities serving a local geographical area;

• • empowerment strategies to build the moral and social capacity of individuals residing in a local community;

• • social order policies to enforce security and control ‘problem’ behaviour within residential communities.

Under the New Labour governments (1997–2010), a combination of all three of these approaches was evident in a range of urban welfare programmes (see Imrie and Raco, 2003, for an overview). However, in step with a wider critique, which argued that New Labour pursued conditional and punitive welfare (see for instance Levitas, 1998), place-based policies were often analysed as disciplinary mechanisms implemented to build ‘responsible’ and ‘orderly’ communities (see for example Atkinson and Helms, 2007). This perspective, which fits with the broad premise of this chapter, is underpinned by two key strands of thought. First, there has been a critical social policy tradition (Mann, 1998) that has tended to conceive of policy interventions in the lives of the poorest people in society as relying on behaviourist explanations of poverty, and which therefore consider controls, incentives and frameworks for behaviour change ethically and politically problematic. Second, there are also aspects of a critical urban studies literature arguing that the political economy of urban space involves the rolling out (Peck and Tickell, 2002) of disciplinary and punitive state strategies within poor residential communities. From such a standpoint, policy interventions – underpinned by an anti-welfare ideology (MacLeod and Johnstone, 2012) – seek to police, exclude and displace troublesome populations in order to enable profit-seeking projects of urban renaissance (Ward, 2003; Wacquant, 2008).

This chapter examines the enduring behaviourism that underpins much recent welfare and communities policy. It begins by briefly situating governmental discipline of individuals and communities within a broader agenda of neoliberal regulation, before proceeding to analyse the approaches of New Labour and the coalition government, and identifying the fresh agendas through which behaviour-shaping has been authorised and textured.