The Rise of the Digital Welfare State

PUBLIC TALK - THE RISE OF THE DIGITAL WELFARE STATE
Speaker: Professor Kathryn Henne, Director, RegNet (ANU)

WHEN: Thursday 24 April 2025, 12noon-2pm (includes lunch), Lecture starts at 12.30pm
WHERE: Forrest Hall, 21 Hackett Dr, Crawley

In 2019, Philip Alston, then UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty, warned of harms emerging from the rise of the digital welfare state, which he framed as the growing reliance on digital data and technologies to target and monitor social assistance recipients. Mixed narratives about the digital welfare state continue to circulate: organisations like the OECD suggest the digitalisation of aid and social services increases productivity and improves inclusivity, even as analyses draw attention to how such tools can embed biased assumptions about the populations they are meant to help. This presentation reflects on empirical insights from a multi-year research project that includes case studies in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It highlights how these findings not only trouble popular narratives but also reveal emergent contours of welfare governance. They illuminate new dimensions that can extend existing observations about what scholars commonly call the ‘regulatory state’.

Professor Kathryn (Kate) Henne is the Director of RegNet, the Australian National University (ANU) School of Regulation and Global Governance and leads the Justice and Technoscience Lab (JusTech). She also serves on the executive of the ANU Integrated AI Network and is an honorary professor at Arizona State University, USA. Her research is concerned with how science and technology contribute to shifts in the governance of health, public safety, and social welfare.

This lecture is presented by the Forrest Research Foundation, UWA Institute of Advanced Studies, UWA Public Policy Institute and the UWA Tech & Policy Lab.