Governing through personal assistance: a Bulgarian case

ABSTRACT

This paper brings together concepts from the domains of disability studies, governmentality studies and Actor-Network Theory in order to develop a micro-level analysis of a scheme for the provision of personal assistance for disabled people, currently administered by the Sofia Municipality in Bulgaria. The workfare conditionality embedded in the scheme’s needs assessment procedure is highlighted and subjected to critique. The micro-level analysis is deployed on the background of wider, macro-level observations concerning the neoliberal mode of government and its relations to subjectivity and freedom. The conclusion suggests practical policy alternatives in line with the Independent Living philosophy and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Disability policy
• governmentality studies
• independent living
• neoliberalism
• workfare

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Alan Cribb and the anonymous referees of the journal for their constructive comments that helped to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Teodor Mladenov is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Public Policy Research, King’s College London, UK. He is author of Critical Theory and Disability: A Phenomenological Approach (2015, Bloomsbury). In the period 2000–2009, Teodor was actively involved in disabled people’s advocacy for Independent Living in Bulgaria.

Notes

1. The current version of the AIL Ordinance and its annexes are available online at http://dsd.sofia.bg/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=76&Itemid=35 (accessed 4 September 2015).

2. Yet even the capacity for autonomous decision-making, which is usually regarded as a purely cognitive process, requires enabling environments, as the relational autonomy theorists have argued (Mackenzie 2008). The corollaries of the relational or distributed understanding of human being for personal assistance have been explored in Mladenov (2012).

3. More than any other regime of government, neoliberalism works as ‘a political project that endeavors to create a social reality that it suggests already exists’ (Lemke 2002, 60).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [grant number ECF-2013-246].