Carlotta Mozzana, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
Davide Caselli, Università degli Studi di Torino

The session aims to tackle the issue of time in care by focusing on two trends: a) the increasing speed by which policy frames and policy tools are elaborated and circulate globally; b) the policy-makers’ ambition to shape and control the future through the use of anticipative tools based on quantitative data and knowledge (e.g. social impact metrics).
Contemporary public action is embedded into a complex global fast policy regime (Theodore, Peck 2015), based on increasingly globally interconnected policy communities that create a complex temporality of policy transfer. This regime is made on the one hand of fast circulation and adoption of policy frames and tools through the widespread reference to international best practices and benchmarking; and on the other of slow, gradual and path-dependent adaptations to the local socio- institutional context. This is true also for care policies and services, where new actors (with their policy frames and the informational bases upon which they rely) have emerged and contribute to reshape policies and practices.
But time is important here not only for qualifying the speed of such circulation but also as a specific dimension embedded into the policies and practices themselves. In order to reduce uncertainty and to justify public spending in the field of welfare, care policies are increasingly based on predictive and anticipative techniques such as assessment and evaluation metrics that project actual actions in the future.
The session invites empirical and theoretical papers dealing with these two specific problems of temporality in the field of care policies. Interesting contributions may include (but are not limited to):
• Analysis of the elaboration and circulation of policy frames and policy tools in specific policy areas (e.g. active ageing; home care; social impact assessment): who are the actors involved in the process and what kind of temporality does this circulation involve?
• the making of a global Fast Policy Regime in the field of care (e.g. analysis of specific policy and epistemic communities operating at the global level; analysis of local and national networks of expertise mediating global trends, etc);
• the analysis of the logics of care that are promoted through the use of anticipatory, pre- visional, impact-oriented tools in the realm of care policy. How do such tools promote specific logics of action? How do they modify existing logics and practices of care?
• Analysis of the conflicts taking place into the Fast (care) policy regime: emerging forms resistance and elaboration of alternative/new/different paradigms and informational bases for care policies and services.