This book is an edited volume based on the EU-financed research project ‘Local Worlds of Social Cohesion: The Local Dimension of Integrated Social and Employment Policies’ (LOCALISE). The book starts from the assumption that the activation paradigm, which has penetrated all European welfare states, poses new coordination problems which become manifest most notably on the local level. The most significant coordination problem is the relation between anti-poverty policies, employers’ insurances against disability and unemployment, and activation policies. These policies have different institutional contexts, different histories and different policy logics in almost all European countries. In addition, the local level seems to gain importance in social policy delivery, at least in some countries. The central research question of the LOCALISE project was “how local public, private and third-sector organizations deal with the challenges provoked by the need for increased inter-organizational cooperation across different political levels (local, national and in some cases regional and European), societal sectors (public, private and third sector) and formerly separated policy fields (for example family policy, social policy, employment policy and health policy” (p. 3).
The book contains a theoretical introduction, which is the backbone of the empirical studies. This theoretical chapter distinguishes between horizontal fragmentation and vertical fragmentation of policies, and discusses different strategies to overcome these two types of fragmentation. It also identifies factors that either enable or hinder the integration of services at the street-level. This theoretical introduction is followed by six country descriptions (Sweden, Poland, the UK, Italy, France and Germany). Then the book closes off with four comparative chapters which focus on the attempts to integrate policies on the European, the national, the local and the individual level. As the book is the result of an overall research project, its coherence is out of the question. However, the magnitude of the institutional differences between countries also is clearly reflected in the book. This has made the theoretical challenge immense: not only do the different welfare regimes interfere with the book's central goal, but also the state structure, institutional context and national culture interfere with it. Therefore, it appears very hard to reduce the coordination challenge to a comprehensive set. When reading the country chapters, each coordination challenge seems to be unique and seems to call for a unique solution as well. For this reason, each of the country chapters provide a lot of detail on the set-up of the coordination challenge in each setting. This is inevitable and necessary, but at the same time it obscures the commonalty of the coordination challenges in different countries. In short, this is also the main conclusion of the comparative chapter on coordination practices at the national level: “First, despite differences in degrees, a fully integrated national activation policy is lacking in all six countries due to persistent sectorial and territorial boundaries. Second, the reasons behind this diversity lie in different institutional legacies and national political agendas” (p. 232).
The most innovative chapter in the book is the chapter by Zimmerman, Fuertes and Aurich-Beerheide on the coordination of activation at the local level. It is methodologically innovative because it uses the methodological principles of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to identify descriptive clusters rather than explanatory paths. On the base of this, a distinction is made between coordination at the level of services, administrative levels and stakeholders. All countries coordinate at the stakeholder level, some of them coordinate on the administrative and stakeholder level and a limited number coordinates on all three levels. This gives rise to new, explanatory questions about the causes and consequences of these different forms of coordination. I would have liked to see a continued reflection on this in the final chapter, which now focuses on coordination at the individual level in only two countries: Sweden and Poland.
The central question of this book is a descriptive one: how do countries coordinate. This book provides a clear answer to this question from a theoretical perspective as well as from an empirical perspective. In doing so, it is very helpful for practitioners and scholars with a keen interest in coordinating or integrating fragmented social policies and services. In addition, it also paves the road for the next research steps: why and to what effect do countries implement specific forms of coordination?
