Hegemony, Common Sense and Good Sense: A Gramscian Study of Policymakers' Perspectives on Dealing with Poverty in Child Welfare and Protection.

This article examines the dominant discourse and policymaking approaches to poverty within Child Welfare and Protection (CWP) services in Flanders, Belgium, using a Gramscian framework focused on hegemony, common sense, and good sense. It finds that CWP policy predominantly frames poverty as a pedagogical issue linked to parental failure, reinforced by risk-based models like Signs of Safety, which emphasize parental responsibility while largely neglecting structural causes of poverty. Although front line social workers employ informal strategies to address poverty’s impact, the absence of a formal poverty policy limits organizational support and perpetuates stigma toward families. The study identifies emerging counter-narratives among policymakers advocating for a rights-based, poverty-aware approach that includes structural cooperation with socio-economic actors, highlighting tensions within the dominant discourse that could enable future policy transformation.