R. Titmuss and G.Esping-Andersen an the end of last century created a well-known welfare typology, politically based on left-right division and de-commodification relations. Can a mainly communities-based welfare model be created instead of the former welfare division?
States can be considered to be complex systems, which, in principle, are very difficult to model anyway. In the case that you are interested in my modest approach, which can be classified as "nimbling", I attach my recent book.
Book Missing a Decent Living for Everyone: Success and Failure in...
This is being explored in many developing countries due to lack of capacity at higher levels of government, mostly becuase of the possibility it offers to improve accountability.
However, it reduces the potential legitimacy of the national state be reducing the scope of its involvement in the lives of citizens. I do not think that is a problem in and of itself, but I think national governments would normally prefer to take credit for these things because it legitimizes their authority to tax, rather than devolving both taxation powers and services delivery responsibility to local governments. I think that regimes would mostly only tolerate this if they were quite confident in their perceived legitimacy.
Also, there could be problems with funding formulas, for example if lots of people moved from one jurisdiction to another. In China, for example, you pay into one municipal plan for certain areas of social insurance, but it is not portable, with the result that the most vulnerable workers usually get the lowest returns from their social security contributions. I really like the ideas and ideals of community-level funding AND delivery of these services, but I think the level of pooling is too small to offer the level of social security that most people would prefer to have (with the exception of some very narrow segments who are very wealthy and obtain their social security primarily through regime stability and police, etc.).
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