Drawing on the comparative findings from the six case studies of this book, this chapter contrasts policy triage patterns across countries, sectors, and administrative levels. The chapter highlights that while Denmark stands out due to its generally low triage levels thanks to well-funded, consensus-oriented governance, Italy and Portugal exhibit frequent and severe triage due to rapid policy growth, few limitations of blame-shifting, and scant opportunities to mobilize resources. Germany falls into an intermediate zone where bureaucratic rigidity fosters mostly moderate triage, while the UK and Ireland display more heterogeneous patterns across organizations in both sectors. The “aggregated” country patterns align well with what we would expect from the countries’ administrative traditions. Among other aspects, countries with a stronger legalistic tradition tend to exhibit more consistent triage patterns, whereas those where more independence is given and managerial leeway is granted to the authorities show more varied practices across organizations. Across the board, with regard to the cross-sectoral variation, the chapter highlights that environmental implementers tend to face more triage than social implementers, due to weaker overload compensation and greater opportunities for political blame-shifting. Furthermore, central- versus local-level differences tend to hinge on two key mechanisms: Organizations at the national level sometimes demonstrate robust capacity for resource mobilization and blame-shifting insulation, while subnational bodies, especially in Italy and Portugal, often lack such buffers. Across all settings, partial overload compensation can stave off the worst consequences of triage, yet some agencies’ capacities are already stretched beyond their limits. Taken together, these observations underscore the pivotal roles of limitations of political blame-shifting, resources mobilization, and organizational overload compensation in determining how policy implementers across Europe contend with administrative overload as a result of policy accumulation.

This concluding chapter synthesizes the findings and theoretical insights developed throughout the book. Over the past decades, the accumulation of policies often has not been matched by proportional expansions in administrative capacity, fueling bureaucratic overload. While some countries, agencies, and policy sectors have managed to curb triage and maintain effective implementation, others have become susceptible to frequent and severe triage. Three main factors determine these outcomes: first, policymakers’ ability (or inability) to shift blame for policy failures onto implementers; second, organizations’ capacity to mobilize additional resources amid new policy demands; and third, the extent to which agencies are able to compensate for overload. Notably, environmental policy implementers are more vulnerable to policy triage, due to weaker political incentives and more fragmented governance. Social policy agencies benefit somewhat from tighter oversight and direct voter visibility but can still be undermined by austerity and politicized attacks on bureaucratic morale. Ultimately, the sustainability of modern governance hinges on institutional reforms that align policymaking and implementation more closely. Failure to do so not only erodes administrative performance and public trust but can also enable intentional sabotage of the bureaucratic state by governments seeking to dismantle its core capacities.

Our point of departure has been that, by using the language of solidarity, we – consciously or not – participate in the politics of it. The group of authors coming together in this volume contribute analyses of solidarity as a norm, a process, a practice, or a vocabulary creating polyperspectivity. In so doing, we let the course of our analysis be directed by the actors we investigate over a span of time in history. From the start, our intent has been to engage in a double move: to deploy history as an interpretive practice – a theory, a methodology, a philosophy – with which to engage law; and, simultaneously, to offer history as a substantive arena in which other interpretive practices from across a broader array of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences can engage with law.

Chapter 1 introduces the region of Kiambu in detail, establishing the stakes of moral debate over wealth amongst men in the region. While an older generation preaches the labour ideology (the notion that hard work will bring success) that allowed them to prosper in the aftermath of independence, it has been undermined by dwindling land holdings and opportunities for ‘off-farm income’, creating a crisis of hopelessness as young men wonder if they will ever reach the ‘level’ of their elders. Framing the study of masculine destitution to follow, the chapter discusses the legacies of the ‘Kenya Debate’, a regional debate in political economy about the relative prosperity of Kenya’s peasantry after independence. It argues for a processual, non-static approach to economic change in central Kenya, allowing us to see how class divides have been opened across generations due to population pressure on land. Its subdivision within families exerts stronger pressure on young family members who find themselves in the situation of being virtual paupers – land poor and ‘hustling’ for cash.

In this paper, I discuss the possibilities of transnational worker solidarity, with a focus on the potential of digital communication that became normalized during the Corona pandemic. I draw on Sally Scholz’s distinction between different types of solidarity and argue that historical forms of worker solidarity were often a combination of social and political forms of solidarity, in concrete local settings responding to concrete local problems. I also draw on economic and psychological considerations for explaining how these constellations helped bring about solidaristic action. I then provide arguments for why, despite various reasons for pessimism, transnational worker solidarity is, today, needed maybe more than ever. New digital technologies and the social habits that are developing around them have the potential to give a new impulse to transnational worker solidarity, because they can create levels of connectedness and trust that are closer to those experienced by certain historical worker communities, for whom social and political solidarity overlapped. But these opportunities can often not be grasped because of legal obstacles. Therefore, I conclude by postulating that workers should have a right to “know their colleagues” along value chains, allowing those who work together to connect in ways that potentially lead to solidaristic action.

This chapter focuses on the choices that families made about birthing practitioners and where women would deliver. From the eighteenth century, man-midwives dominated the delivery of babies in England. Historians’ accounts have suggested that this incursion was a transformative moment in which men wrestled control of childbirth from women. This chapter shows that because men were so involved in shaping the experience of making babies throughout the seventeenth century, the arrival of men-midwives was not the surprising development represented by other historians. Although birthing chambers in the seventeenth century were almost always female-only, the medical and material preparations for delivery were not at all homosocial. Women gave birth amidst objects that had been procured by female and male family members. The location of the birthing chamber was also often a family one: in the woman’s father’s or father-in-law’s home. Male midwives therefore had a much easier job convincing families to choose them over female practitioners than previous histories have imagined.

Researchers and policy makers are in basic agreement that refugees admitted to the European Union constitute a net cost and fiscal burden for the receiving societies. As is often claimed, there is a trade-off between refugee migration and the fiscal sustainability of the welfare state. This chapter argues that the consensual cost-perspective on migration is built on a flawed economic conception of the orthodox ‘sound finance’ paradigm. By shifting perspective to examine migration through the macroeconomic lens offered by Modern Monetary Theory, the chapter demonstrates sound finance’s detrimental impact on migration policy and research. Most importantly, however, this undertaking offers the tools with which both migration research and migration policy could be modernized and put on a realistic footing. As will be shown, this also has fundamental consequences for our conception of human rights and solidarity.

This chapter examines the social and material preparations that households made for an impending birth. Family members were fascinated by the look and size of women’s bellies, so much so that women’s stomachs were often highlighted in portraits and they featured prominently in correspondence. Married women’s ‘big bellies’ were celebrated because they displayed the fruitfulness of the family, whereas unmarried women sought to conceal their pregnant state. The process of buying and borrowing things for childbirth including linen, baby clothes and birthing stools have often been represented as hallmarks of a celebratory and extravagant female culture that excluded male family members. This chapter finds instead that male family members were key players in this material culture. Added to this, correspondence shows that men were active in imagining the appearance and nature of unborn children in ways that embedded them within their family-to-be. This material and emotional investment was, however, entirely dependent on marital fidelity by wives. Men’s domestic and fiscal honour was intertwined with the performance of women’s bodies.

A conversation curated from an online event, Decolonising the Arts in Latin America: Anti-Racist Irruptions in the Art World. Artists from different parts of Latin America talk about their work from a decolonial and anti-racist perspective. Participants include Miriam Álvarez, director of the Mapuche theatre company El Katango; Alejandra Ejido, director of the Afro-Argentine company Teatro en Sepia; Ashanti Dinah Orozco, Afro-Colombian poet and Afro-feminist activist; Rafael Palacios, founder and director of the Afro-contemporary dance company Sankofa Danzafro; and Arissana Pataxó and Denilson Baniwa, Brazilian Indigenous visual artists.

Chapter 4 turns towards the role of women’s work in reproducing the household, focusing on the labour of relation-making in the neighbourhood as a means of creating economic networks through which material assistance can be sought. Commenting on anthropological literature that frames African contexts as ones of ‘mutuality’ and ‘obligation’, the chapter discusses the difficulty of finding assistance for aspirational projects (especially school fees) in an atomised neighbourhood where families compete for the prestige of economic advancement. It remarks upon the possibilities and limits of caring labour as a means through which women enter into economic relations of mutual support with others.

The conversation draws on two texts by members of the art collective Identidad Marrón, which both explore how racialised subalterns can decolonise the art world and specifically museums. The first is a statement by visual artist Abril Caríssimo; the second is a text by Flora Alvarado y América López, titled ‘Malonear los museos’, reflecting on their experience of curating an exhibition titled Qué necesitan aprender los museos? (What Do Museums Need to Learn?) for the public Palais de Glace museum, Buenos Aires, Argentina.