Documents Kazepov, Yuri 5 results

"This paper presents stylized profiles of the welfare regimes of Austria, Italy and Belgium. It gives a brief overview of the demographic condition and socioeconomic dynamics (especially poverty) of the respective countries, its social policies and expenditures, the situation and policies with regard to labour market and activation, education and the position of ethnic minorities and housing. We combine this with descriptions of the vertical and horizontal governance system of its welfare regime. Finally, on the basis of the all this, we reflect on how a range of governance challenges for socially innovative initiatives, related to the need to coordinate a multiplicity of actors and instruments and work across various spatial scales, express themselves in each of these three welfare regimes. The main aim of this paper is to act as a background document to facilitate the comparison between case studies of socially innovative initiatives and assess how the type of welfare regime and its horizontal and vertical governance system shape the forms of social innovation that emerge in particular countries."

"This paper is concerned with local social innovation in the field of poverty reduction. We argue that local social innovation aimed at poverty reduction should be discussed in the context of the ongoing restructuring of the welfare state in Europe and debates about the future of social policy, paying particular attention to institutional features such as the territorial organization of the welfare system and changes in the welfare mix. Rather than seeing local social innovation as a new paradigm for social intervention that can potentially replace the welfare state, we see local social innovation as a wave of initiatives that is part and parcel of an ongoing spatio-institutional restructuring of welfare states, leading to a more complex rather than a completely different welfare mix.We start this paper with a general definition of social innovation as an innovation that is innovative both in its goals and means and then develop a more customised definition for the field of poverty reduction. We do so by discussing three core characteristics of social innovation in this area, namely its approach of poverty as a multidimensional and relational phenomenon, its critique of bureaucratic and centralized welfare institutions and its place-based character. This leads us to define local social innovations in the field of poverty reduction as locally embedded practices, actions and policies that enable socially excluded and impoverished individuals and social groups to satisfy basic needs for which they find no adequate solution in the private market or institutionalized macro-level welfare policies.In a final part of the paper, we build on this customized definition to analyze the relationship between social innovation and macro-level welfare state policies. We show how the spatio-institutional restructuring of welfare states in recent decades have created many points of contact between macro-level welfare policies and local social innovations and that recent and that social innovation has recently emerged on the European social agenda. Finally, by way of identifying issues of interest for empirical research on the relationship between social innovation and welfare state, we look at how local social innovations organize social interventions differently from conventional welfare state policies and social investment strategies."

"This paper is concerned with the spatial and institutional conditions under which localized forms of social innovation can complement and strengthen existing institutionalized welfare programs and schemes. It aims to identify relevant concepts to analytically frame socially innovative policies within the changing institutional context of welfare state policies. In order to do so, we explore several complementary bodies of literature: the literature on welfare state models and welfare mix and the literature on multi-level governance and state rescaling. The paper starts with a brief account of the emergence, evolution and classification of the European welfare states and then goes on to problematize two aspects of contemporary thinking about the welfare state in its various forms, namely methodological nationalism and state-centrism. It does so by analysing the Europeanisation of social policy, the localization of the welfare state and the changing welfare mix. The main part of the paper addresses these two shortcomings. Methodological nationalism is addressed through the literature on state spatial restructuring and multi-level governance, while state-centrism is challenged by discussing the literature on welfare mix and by unpacking the concept of governance in its multiple dimensions. At the end of this part we list the main insights and concepts derived from the literature on state rescaling and multi-level governance that help to shed light on the relationship between local social innovation and the welfare state. In the conclusion to this paper, we connect all this to social innovation and explore how variations in territorial organisation, mode of governance and welfare regimes could correspond to variations in the openness to and capacity of social innovation."

"This paper surveys the literature on localized socially innovative policies and actions aimed at overcoming poverty and social exclusion. The authors show how these local forms of social innovation emerged in the late 1970s against the backdrop of the crisis and transformation of the Western welfare state, the emergence of new social risks and the transition from the Fordist to the knowledge based economy. The paper aims to learn about new or older but as yet too often overlooked poverty and social exclusion dynamics from the locally embedded and collective responses to it by civil society associations, local state institutions and/or social entrepreneurs. The paper first develops a definition of social innovation as it applies to the fight against poverty and social exclusion. In a second part the authors put social innovation in its historical context by discussing three different strands of social innovation research and practice, namely: (1) social innovation as a critique of the territorial innovation model underlying the knowledge-based economy; (2) social innovation as a critique on the bureaucratic nature of the welfare state; and (3) socially innovative forms of neighbourhood development as a response to the urban crisis. The third section of the paper then zooms in on the process dimensions of social innovation for each of the three strands discussed in the second part. The authors propose the metaphor of ‘the elephant and the butterfly' to think through the relationship between localized forms of socially innovative actions and initiatives on the one hand and the macro-level institutions of the welfare state and dialectical interplay between state institutions and civil society associations on the other. The paper concludes with a preliminary list of social needs, trends in poverty and the reconfiguration of welfare institutions and policies that are revealed by place-based socially innovative practices."

"The scientific debate on social investment (SI) is moving from an ideological and normative approach towards a more realistic one. Scholars are paying closer attention to the actual developments in social policy and to the contextual conditions and impacts of SI policies. Considering this, two main issues arise. First, that SI policies are politically feasible and likely to have positive impacts only if specific contextual conditions are met. Second, SI policies were supposed to have a positive impact on both inequalities and economic growth: a strong theoretical assumption that needs to be carefully tested. The Italian case will be used here to illustrate this new perspective and the consequences of the lack of contextual pre-conditions. For this reason, the article is divided into three parts. The first part will present our theoretical argument in the context of the most recent analytical accounts of SI policy in Europe. In particular we will argue that, given the lack of crucial structural pre-conditions, SI policies may have ambiguous and even unexpected negative impacts on both economic growth and equal opportunities. In the second and third parts, we will present empirical evidence of this ambiguity considering childcare and apprenticeship reforms in Italy. More specifically, based on empirical research carried out in Italy, we want to answer two questions: (1) Why is the Italian welfare state so ‘unfriendly' to SI policies? What are the main factors explaining the limited room for SI policies? (2) When an SI approach is promoted in specific policy areas in Italy, what is its social and economic impact? Do these interventions achieve the positive results to be expected according to the SI approach? Finally, the last part synthesises the main arguments and aims to open a critical discussion on the structural pre-conditions of SI policies and the need for further analysis of the political economy contexts in which SI policy develops. "