The morality of inequality: Charity encounters and the making of “Real Need” in austerity Portugal

• Autor(a) principal: Matos, P. A. de.
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/30410
• topic: Austerity; Charity; Inequality; Needs; Portugal

Austerity welfare reforms, often justified as a way of increasing efficiency, fairness and technical targeting in the provision of “those who are really in need”, intensified the transfer of welfare state provisioning responsibilities to private and not-for-profit organizations, which has been accompanied by the rising prominence of religious-based charity organizations as welfare providers. In this article I focus on the administrative interactions between volunteers and claimants that mediate the allocation and distribution of food charity provisioning in a Catholic parish. The analysis developed in this article suggests that under austerity, basic human needs are refashioned as an anti-politics device instrumental in the erosion of economic citizenship, capabilities and entitlements, ultimately enabling the simultaneous technical and moral legitimation of inequality and its outcomes.