Dr Pearce’s successful research grant will fund the WISERD-based research project ‘Youth unemployment and civil society under devolution: a comparative analysis of sub-state welfare regimes’.
The £211,000 grant from the Economic and Social Research Council will fund a two-year project examining divergences in civil society responses to youth unemployment (policy) in the four, devolved nations of the UK, from December 2018. The project aims to identify, categorise and compare scales and types of civil society involvement in youth unemployment policy and provision at sub-state scales of governance. Through critiquing the notion of ‘one UK welfare state’ it will also progress our understanding of the impact of decentralisation, devolution and territorial rescaling on welfare state formation across Western Europe. Professor Paul Chaney will be the Mentor for the project and Dr Pearce the Principal Investigator. The research findings will provide recommendations based on the implications of devolved differences for youth unemployment policy and practice.