Governing homelessness : the discursive and institutional construction of homelessness in Australia
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2010
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This thesis analyses changes in the ways in which the phenomenon of ‘homelessness’
has been conceptualised in Australian policies, programs and services for homeless
people since the early 1980s. My experience working in this area suggested to me that a
fundamental shift had occurred, away from a policy understanding of the causes of
homelessness as being produced by ‘structural’ social and economic factors such as
poverty, lack of affordable housing and domestic violence, to one in which
homelessness was now understood more as a result of ‘individual’ issues caused by
problems or behaviours of homeless people themselves. This thesis asks: how and why
had such changes taken place?
I show that, consistent with my experiences, conceptions of homelessness in policy and
programs have indeed been understood in homelessness research and commentary in
terms of, on the one hand, structuralist conceptions of the causes of homelessness, and
on the other hand, explanations that rely on a methodological individualism, with a shift
over the last 30 years from structuralist to methodologically individualist conceptions of
homelessness. Attempts to reconcile these two explanations, for example by means of
the policy concept of ‘social exclusion’, have generally failed in practice to move
beyond this dichotomy.
I address the question by drawing on Foucault’s work on ‘governmentality’ and
examining both historical official statements about homelessness policies and programs
and in depth interviews with people who have worked in the area. I show how policies
and programs have a constructive role in shaping understandings of homelessness and
of the situations of homeless people. In particular, I show how changes in homelessness
policies and programs over the past thirty years involved not a retreat of the state as
some commentators assert, but an extension and reconfiguration of political power
‘beyond the state’ through a diversity of service providers. These changes sought to
replace the welfare state with an ‘enabling’ state or so-called ‘advanced liberal
governmentality’ which characterised the causes of homelessness in terms of
‘dependency’. Homelessness programs became focussed on techniques designed to
produce a managed form of self-reliance - interlinking both freedom and constraint. The
policy conceptualisation of homelessness shifted towards ‘individual’ factors and away
from ‘structural’ factors. The ambiguous nature of these techniques is reflected in
evidence of both improvements and reductions in service delivery, including the
exclusion from services of some ‘high risk’ homeless people who could or would not
meet case management requirements.
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