The new features and dynamics of the international flow of goods, capital, and people demand a reconsideration of classic and substantial sociological problematics and the frameworks we use to approach them. It is no longer feasible to consider an image of rectilinear maps of a Keynesian-Westphalian world, where society is synonymous to the nation state and its territory, sovereignty, and culture. The multiplication of social life scales, produces a complexification of problems of social justice and social inequality. In this scenario, is it possible to address the social question in a satisfactory manner without referring to transnational levels? We live in an age of migration, not only because people are moving more and more, but also due to new relations of space and time, marked by the possibility of simultaneity and time–space compression. Migrants and non-migrants are in routine connection with more than one country through the transnationalization of people, social networks, organisations and institutions. Not only the greater capacity of movement, the easier connection between people through dispersed places, and the portability of care and rights, but also the intersection of multiscale inequalities, stimulates the development of transnational mobilities.

The emergence of transnational lives has an impact on how we think about social protection, as it transforms the ways individuals and groups face social risks that emerge in capitalist economies in the spheres of employment, education, health, and care. Consequently, a research agenda on transnational social protection has been emerging in recent years. The ambition of this paper is to contribute to this agenda, highlighting the individuals’ and families’ agency in the development of strategies of transnational social protection. Specifically, this communication argues that the strategies of transnational social protection express the interface between informal (interpersonal networks) and formal social protection (provided by national states and organisations), not only through their objective elements (multi-sited resources and services), but also by their subjective aspects (actors’ meanings and policies’ normative concepts).

The understanding of the actors’ subjective meanings has the potential to articulate the interpretation of transnational ways to access resources of social protection, with the comprehension of the meanings that motivate different modes of use of these resources by mobile and non-mobile actors. This two-dimensional approach also allows an understanding of how different kinds of inequalities (such as gender and generational) are produced, justified/explained, transformed, and reproduced within transnational family networks. “In which school (and country) will my daughter study?”, “and my son?”, “in which hospitals will my sick relative be treated?”, “where, when, and how will I retire?”, to answer these questions, the subjective meanings of social protection are crucial.

In this article, it is presented the meanings of social protection of Bolivian transnational families in Barcelona and Sao Paulo. For this purpose, it is analysed a survey and semi-structured interviews from the “Return from Transnationalism” project (RETTRANS, 2011-2013) and life story interviews from the doctoral project “Transnational social protection: Bolivian transnational families in Barcelona and Sao Paulo”. This paper is organised in three parts. First, it is introduced the transnational family and transnational social protection concepts and research agendas. After, it is described the key current characteristics of the Bolivian migration to Barcelona and Sao Paulo. In the last part, it is presented some evidences of how subjective meanings of family transnationalization, care and gender relations, remittances and labour, healthcare, education, and retirement permeate transnational strategies of social protection. In the narratives of the interviewees it was clear that these strategies occur in the loose soil of a world of plural scales, streams, connections, and networks, where people have multiple aspirations around the social protection and the realisation of these conceptions tends to be uncertain, depending on the individual and family action. There is a very strong tendency towards a family and individual responsibilization for social protection. Families feel as they are the only ones responsible for their own protection, potentially being blamed for possible gaps and absences. Little is expected from the states, whether in Bolivia, Barcelona or Sao Paulo. In many cases, this responsibilization is turned into a guilt feeling, especially in the case of women who end up receiving a greater burden. What does it mean for the understanding of the relationship between individual and society when social life becomes transnational and the social protection is a multi-sited family’s quest? Is the transnationalization of the social question also an individualisation and a new way of familization of the social protection?