Current knowledge about the public social welfare sphere is vast, but fragmented. Boundaries defined by geography, language, and culture hinder knowledge exchange globally. In addition, there are not enough opportunities for explorers of the field's two conceptual hemispheres—social policy and social administration—to share insights across disciplinary boundaries.

The Oxford Handbook of Governance and Management for Social Policy seeks to overcome these obstacles by applying multiple administrative lenses to diverse social policy issues from around the globe. Authors were carefully chosen by editors based in Africa, Asia, Australasia, Canada and the United States, Europe, and Latin America to detail the challenges facing their regions' social welfare spheres and the ways in which social systems have responded.

Each main section of the handbook profiles the state of interdisciplinary knowledge in a geographic region during the decades spanning the turn of the millennium. Sub-sections of the handbook are organized thematically to enable inter-regional comparisons and spark insights across socio-cultural and academic boundaries. The result is a map of the intersection of social policy, governance studies, and public management on the eve of the COVID-19 global pandemic on all six of our planet's continuously inhabited continents.

Starting in 2020, the pandemic and related crises forced adaptations to social welfare systems in every part of the world, with implications that may not be understood for generations. Future researchers will describe and measure such changes relative to benchmarks set in the pre-pandemic period, including the rich variety of practices and paradigms collected in this handbook.