Multidimensional Changes in the Territorial Spanish Welfare Governance during the Great Recession

This paper seeks to examine whether the financial crisis and specifically the fiscal consolidation strategies developed to contain the effects of the Great Recession have affected the way in which the welfare state is governed in its territorial dimension. While a number of countries launched decentralization processes affecting social policies in the last decades, it seems that some experiences of recentralization had happened in this policy during the crisis. Some studies about different social policies have revealed a more complex picture already unfolding before the crisis, in which the welfare state governance transformation is shown as a multidimensional phenomenon. While some of its dimensions have experienced changes, other have remained unaltered. Coming from a tradition of strong centralization, devolution was one of the main trends in the institutional development of the Welfare State in Spain from the 1990s and the 2000s onwards. As a result of this process, substate governments in Spain have important powers in health, long-term, active labour policies and social services. However, it is not entirely clear to what extent this trend has changed from 2007 to now. Studying four social policy sectors in the Spanish case, we address the questions of whether, in which of its dimensions and trough which mechanisms, territorial welfare governance in Spain has evolved since the onset of the crisis and the implementation of austerity policies.