Introduction
The political landscape in the Western democracies and welfare states is currently being dominated by a banking crisis and a crisis of public accounting. These have necessitated swift and radical reforms to public services. But this is occurring at exactly the moment when governments and their welfare policies are focusing on strategies for rescuing the system rather than developing any new options for a different and better life for citizens. It is in this context that the discourse on social innovation in Europe has finally reached the central policy documents of the European Commission (BEPA, 2010). The official rhetoric of at least some EU countries seems to demonstrate two things. On the one hand, the link to social innovation reflects a search for small-scale changes and coping strategies that can be made to work in the space that remains for immediate action, despite the apparent ‘freezing’ of wider welfare systems and policies. On the other hand, the high hopes that are so often invested in small-scale changes and local reforms, increasingly framed in terms of social innovation, reveal something about the constant need for notions of ‘utopia’ at a time when mainstream politics is telling citizens that there is no alternative.
Turning from the public debate to the academic and intellectual debate on welfare and social policy, there too social innovation and change through welfare reform seem to be quite different topics. We will argue that the mainstream welfare debates have so far included social innovation at the local level to only a very limited extent, which makes it difficult to establish a productive link between ongoing social policy research on the one hand and the emerging literature on social innovation on the other. This article seeks to relate social policy and the academic and intellectual debate on social innovation. It will do this on the basis of the results of a major international research project that looked at a broad sample of social innovations at the local level designed to promote cohesion and their relevance to local welfare systems. Our argument will be developed in two stages:
• The first section will argue why social innovation and the local level have occupied a rather marginal position in past and most current academic debates on welfare reform, and describe the approach of the WILCO research project mentioned above, which analysed the implications that localised social innovation in the field of social services may have for the debate on social policy and welfare.
• In the second section, we will present some of the results of our cross-cut analysis of 77 such social innovations, focusing on patterns of repeated approaches and instruments in three fields of social policy and social service development: the search for new ways of addressing users and citizens; the emphasis on new risk and related approaches to issues of rights and responsibilities; and finally the concern with issues of governance as they manifest themselves at the local levels of welfare systems.
What differentiates the debate on social innovation from discursive traditions in social policy?
The debate on social innovation has, hitherto, not taken much account of discourse on welfare and social policy. Rather, it has primarily been concerned with clarifying how social innovation differs from traditional discourses on market-based technological innovations. It has emphasised how social innovation aims to develop new forms of organisation and social action to tackle social issues (for an overview see Jenson and Harrisson, Reference Jenson and Harrisson2013) by developing practices and institutions that can be seen as ‘social’ in both their aims and means (BEPA, 2010: 31f). Obviously, then, the field of social innovation is broader than the traditional field of social policy; social innovation can include urban development, environmental issues and other topics of broader public policy (Mulgan et al., Reference Mulgan, Ali, Halkett and Sanders2007). The fact that the institutions of the EU, which play a major role in the development of the debate on social innovation, focus on issues of cohesion and inclusion may underline a link with social policy. However, this link remains rather weak as long as the very terms used in much of the debate on social innovation are restricted to matters of ‘scaling up’ small-scale innovations, financing their existence and expansion through special programmes for development and evaluation (European Commission, 2012). Accordingly, social innovation can all too easily appear as a special arrangement for the institutional construction of policies and services that may otherwise remain unchanged in their logics and functioning.
Turning to the academic debates on social policy, we also find some major reasons for the low level of interest in social innovation today.
A first observation concerns the near absence of social innovation when issues of change are addressed. Changes that come from economy and society have been considered primarily in terms of technology innovations on markets and their corollaries in society and politics. The debate on the Fordist revolution, which introduced innovations in industrial production, and its social and political counterparts, is one prominent example of the link made between technological and market-based innovations and the challenge of welfare reforms. However, that does not mean that reforms with an innovative social character have not been touched on at all. Indeed, social policy debates have been sensitive to changing lifestyles as kinds of innovatory developments ever since. But these issues were taken up mainly as a challenge for state action, and rarely with an eye to the innovative coping strategies and solutions that have been developed by people and social actors themselves. It is interesting to see that Esping-Andersen (Reference Esping-Andersen2002: 11), for example, talks of the three pillars of the institutional system that make up welfare: the state, the market and the family. Innovative action in the production of welfare by organisations in the public sphere is not mentioned. There is a long history of innovations brought about by cooperatives, charities and more recently all kinds of voluntary organisations or community projects that have merged with more recent social movements (Evers and Laville, Reference Evers and Laville2004), but none of these have received much attention in the dominating theoretical concepts of building institutions for welfare.
This leads to a second major reason for the marginalisation of social innovation: most social innovations are local phenomena. The regulation of the dynamics of market societies, by contrast, tends to prioritise the role of central politics in welfare. While it is generally acknowledged that there will be local variations, it is only recently that the impact of local public institutions, in the form of urban and municipal policies, has received more attention. This has occurred in the context of debates on multi-level governance, revealing the potential of a form of politics that simultaneously makes use of developments at the grassroots level and inputs from central management and regulation (Kazepov, Reference Kazepov2010). An additional factor is the growing influence of social services as constitutive elements of welfare. Across welfare regimes, there is a strong link between local authorities and service provision, and this is something that has led to new perspectives on the balance between centralised universal and standardising politics on the one hand and the role and potential of local politics on the other: local politics may not only be ‘special’ and non-standard, but it may actually play a pioneering and innovative role.
From here a third key issue becomes visible: the concepts of governance, blueprints for the reform of welfare. Looking back from today's debates on issues of governance, participation, civil society and democracy, one can say that there has always been a fairly centralising and étatist bias in most literature on welfare. Centralism seems to have been a primary concern since basic welfare goals, particularly those that relate to social security, equal access to public goods and services and, ultimately, the historical process of establishing discipline (Wagner, Reference Wagner1994), have required universal and central regulation. It was for this reason that cities or regions that tried to act differently when it came to designing services were often viewed with considerable distrust. Étatism continues to play an important role today. The emergence of new welfare arrangements and innovations are seen from there mainly in terms of how new solutions can be assimilated. There is then a quite limited space for diversity and non-state public policies and solutions. For example, in the history of labour movements, concerns with creating different ‘social economies’ (for example, through the establishment of cooperatives or mutuals (Defourny, Reference Defourny2009)), but also the potential of new social enterprises and social businesses, are quite often viewed as second-best options, and priority has been given to state regulation when it comes to injecting ‘social’ elements into market dynamics.
Identifying and analysing recurring instruments and approaches in local social innovation favouring social cohesion – the methods and concerns of the WILCO project
It is against this background that we believe that local social innovations should be monitored carefully with a view to identifying contributions that are enriching and complementary, but also challenging when it comes to the debate on welfare and attitudes to welfare.
In the ‘Welfare innovation at the local level in favour of cohesion’ (WILCO) project, social innovations were identified, selected and subsequently analysed and discussed in terms of three basic welfare concerns: (a) the search for new types of social services in terms of the relationships between services and users; (b) new risks and related issues of rights and responsibilities in coping with them; and, finally, (c) changes in governance which make citizens and their organisations a part of public governance arrangements rather than merely being the objects of central governments.
The WILCO project, which was funded by the European Commission from December 2010 to January 2014, had two goals. Firstly, it aimed to identify models, features and trends in local social innovation that had the potential to support the social cohesion which is appearing across Europe despite national differences; for this, a broad reference field for findings should be used. Secondly, it sought to address local contexts and welfare systems as key factors in the diffusion and expansion of such innovations. One of the assumptions behind the project is that the context of local actors, and more specifically the guiding values of local policy systems, make a significant difference to the fate of social innovations, possibly even more so than the respective backgrounds of national regimes and traditions. As such, WILCO's overall focus was on the missing link between innovation at the local level and the conditions for its successful transfer as they can be found in local settings and welfare systems. For this purpose, twenty cities in ten European countries were chosen. Each country was represented by one large and one medium-sized city, for example Birmingham and Dover in the UK, or Berlin and Münster in Germany. Methodologically, each of the ten national WILCO teams selected up to six approaches and projects per city in the fields of child and family care, employment and housing or urban regeneration. The process of selecting innovative case studies was based on desk research, which encompassed newspaper articles, official web pages and grey literature (such as reports, party manifestos) and on semi-structured interviews with, for example, local officials responsible for social affairs and those involved in the provision of services (project managers, agents and clients). One of the main criteria for selection was that the respective projects and approaches were seen as ‘new and promising’, not only on paper but also in the view of local experts and relevant stakeholders. The final sample of 77 social innovations was then analysed to identify common traits and messages, emerging against the backdrop of what can be seen as shared traditions across welfare regimes (Evers et al., Reference Evers, Ewert and Brandsen2014).
Recurring patterns in social innovation
Is there something like a tool kit for devising innovative approaches and instruments? We have tried to identify elements that we came across repeatedly, since the basic problems and challenges that they seek to address can be found across many cities and nations. Obviously, the degree to which contexts allow the development of such new devices will differ quite significantly. However, that is a separate story which we will not touch on in this presentation of the patterns found in the large selection of cases of innovation. Rather, we will focus on three aspects that are important for the wider social service and welfare debate: user relations in social services, new forms of risks, rights and responsibilities and new modes of governance.
Service approaches concerning the interaction with users
Investing in capabilities rather than identifying shortcomings
At the micro-level, a social investment approach is meant to strengthen people's ability to cope better and succeed in modern life and work. According to Amartya Sen (Reference Sen, Nussbaum and Sen1993: 33), ‘the freedom to lead different types of life is reflected in the person's capability set’. However, individual capabilities, such as willingness to learn and to communicate with others or a good degree of self-discipline, have to be built up. So making people more ‘competent’ takes more than money and services: the creation of robust and ‘crisis-proof’ characters requires in-depth learning schemes that address people's whole identity. As such, investment in capabilities is most likely to take place through bundled and integrated services. Moreover, the benefit that people may derive from such service packages depends largely on the interaction between those providing the service, and the individuals who use it. Within service arrangements trusting relationships based on co-production are more likely if the strengths and assets of service users are taken into account and used as a positive foundation that services can build on (Ewert and Evers, Reference Ewert, Evers, Brandsen, Pestoff and Verschuere2012; Osborne, Reference Osborne, Osborne and Brown2013). We observed this strategy of enabling users, instead of blaming them for their shortcomings, throughout our examples. For instance, in most of the innovations classified as ‘work integration social enterprises’, taking existing competences into account is a key element. In this respect, social enterprises such as the neighbourhood companies (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) are strictly asset-based by involving jobless residents in maintenance tasks and, thereby, re-familiarising them gently with customs and rules of the world of work. Companies that are committed to urban renewal in deprived districts in the first place provide multiple opportunities for learning and reintegration (for example, as maintenance workers in a technical team or as receptionists at service points) for residents who have become distanced from the labour market.
Bridging the gap between professional services and people's life worlds
Most welfare users prioritise values such as trust and reliability not only in their personal relationships but also when it comes to interacting with service providers. Personal relationships, which are understood as interactions where people's multiple identities and claims towards service providers are shaped, regain importance in the face of complex service arrangements, often addressing users in a bureaucratic and impersonal manner. Marginalised groups know less about the opportunities for support that exist, and bureaucratic procedures mean that they are often reluctant to use them. In many of the cities that we studied, this gap is filled by individual (or groups of) mentors, who can work as cultural intermediaries because they are acquainted with both worlds.
In this respect, the neighbourhood mothers (in Berlin, Germany) are good examples. Neighbourhood mothers bridge gaps, both in practical terms and symbolically. Basically, the project developed the idea of intercultural mentors to help immigrant families with educational and family-related issues. Neighbourhood mothers, usually immigrants who have undergone training and obtained a special qualification, deal with a wide range of topics such as health promotion, language support and child protection. As a low-threshold service – neighbourhood mothers are easily identifiable by a red scarf so that they can be approached in the street directly – the project attempts to establish informal support networks and trust by building bridges among multicultural communities and authorities. If requested, neighbourhood mothers support families with regular home visits, free of charge. The project may be also a springboard into the labour market: neighbourhood mothers have the opportunity to combine their voluntary work with professional training in order to become assistants for intercultural family care.
New risks, rights and responsibilities in the field of service support
Focusing on new forms of risks
The history of social services has very much been about creating standard solutions for standard risks. In contrast, many of the innovations that we studied involved finding non-standard answers for new social risks (Bonoli, Reference Bonoli2005). Due to the increasing number of transitions in people's lives, such as between school to work, from work to retirement or from motherhood back to employment, the focus of social intervention has shifted to people's temporary vulnerability during these transitions. Forms of ad hoc support are increasingly in demand, for example from young adults, unemployed women and future pensioners. Such a re-shaping of services can be described as a steady process ‘from Taylorism towards tailor-made’, or from ‘collective to individualised regulations’. Nevertheless, innovators have contributed to the modelling of tailor-made services by offering arrangements that take a ‘360-degree view’ of users by addressing their multiple identities (as citizens, consumers, community members, etc.) and, by doing so, take account of all their various needs. The innovative nature of tailored services stems to a significant extent from their ability to react continuously to changing life situations. As such, they represent the opposite of traditional social services, which churn out ‘one-size-fits-all’ products.
One way or another, many of our examples focus on intermediate phases, during which people are ‘half-in and half-out’. For instance, the concept of ‘conditional cash’, as one new transfer instrument is called, combines cash transfers with individual asset building choices such as personal investment in good practices. One good example is the Milan Welfare Foundation (Milan, Italy), which supports individuals and families in Milan, regardless of their previous or current type of employment contract and country of origin, who are in temporary difficulty for various reasons (the loss of a job, illness and so on) and who are not protected by existing social measures. The foundation responds to emerging social needs by supporting micro-entrepreneurship. For this reason, the foundation promotes mutual aid funds, supports the analysis of local social problems and offers seminars, training courses, fellowships and prizes. In addition, the foundation grants access to micro-credit through a network of selected local actors (trade unions, parishes, social cooperatives, associations) that provides local help desks for those suffering from economic difficulties. On the basis of a preliminary inquiry by local help desk officers, the foundation may allocate up to €20,000 to each applicant in order to alleviate temporary need.
From rights to special contracts with individuals and groups
By tradition, most public welfare assistance has been granted on the basis of entitlement, which is essentially unconditional. This means it has usually relied on a set of material preconditions; provided all the boxes are ticked, welfare support will be forthcoming. A new tendency in welfare arrangements, particularly in the field of ‘workfare’, has departed from this principle of entitlement in that clients enter into a kind of contractual relationship whereby the preconditions for assistance relate to their future behaviour. They are required to be willing to undertake certain duties in exchange for what they are given by society. This usually involves demonstrating one's willingness to enhance one's employability by taking part in training programmes and such like. These types of contractual relationships (which are different from traditional entitlements) involve defining responsibilities that the clients then take on exclusively for themselves (or sometimes their next of kin).
In our set of social innovations, however, we identified other types of contracts. These could be referred to as micro-social contracts; they employ a broader notion of giving something back for what one receives from society. Under these, people can access certain goods and services if they commit themselves to doing something for society in the form of voluntary work or predefined work caring for people in need in the local community, for example. An example of such a scheme is Time for roof (Nantes, France), an inter-generational home-share service that offers cheap accommodation to students who enter into an inter-generational co-habitation arrangement. Similarly, a social housing agency (Brescia, Italy) has launched a programme called Doing and living for young people, whereby they as residents pay very low rents in return for becoming involved in certain civic activities, whether these are cultural, social (for example, in the form of integrating migrant workers) or pro-environmental (such as urban gardening).
The changing services governance
Networked organisations and coalitions in action
As we have mentioned already, social services such as childcare, housing and employment have been traditionally framed according to standard patterns. Departing from those service patterns requires new forms of cooperation and ‘innovativeness of partnership’ (Svensson, Reference Svensson and Svensson2008: 37). In an attempt to create ‘joined-up government’ (Newman, Reference Newman2001: 104), organisational arrangements have emerged whereby support comes from different sides. However, forging coalition networks dedicated to particular target groups remains a demanding task.
The example of MAMBA (Münster, Germany) demonstrates how a diverse range of stakeholders can join forces if they are coordinated properly. A key characteristic of the organisation, which works on behalf of migrants and refugees, is that it serves as a focal point for networking activities between the various stakeholders in the city of Münster and the surrounding region. Different organisations cooperate under the MAMBA umbrella: a non-profit refugee relief organisation with a long tradition of counselling as well as lobbying activities on behalf of asylum seekers; a commercial organisation offering training and vocational education programmes; the educational centre of the chamber of handicrafts in Münster; a non-profit organisation affiliated with the welfare association Caritas that provides vocational education and counselling in particular for youngsters and young adults who are facing difficulties accessing the labour market; and the local labour market agency. Each organisation in the network provides different contacts to public, non-profit and for-profit organisations that fund, support or provide training programmes or facilitate access to the labour market through their close contact with the local and regional business community.
Our second example from Spain aims for ‘the common goal of a more inclusive and supportive city’. The Citizen's Agreement for an Inclusive City (Barcelona, Spain) is a framework contract between a range of associations, organisations and local government. Its purpose is to enhance the social capital of the city, its capacity to organise help and stimulate self-help, and to foster cooperation and joint action networks geared towards social inclusion. The agreement, promoted and chaired by the city council, currently includes 422 organisations active in different fields, such as economic development, culture, education, community and social action, urban planning, housing and healthcare and employment. One of the key elements is the establishment of thematic networks of organisations, working on the same issue or problem, such as the homeless people care network, the day-care centres for children and teens network, or the social and labour market integration network. Composed of a plurality of local stakeholders, these networks assist people at risk of social exclusion and carry out projects tailored towards these specific groups. Being a new model of democratic governance in Barcelona, the agreement is permanently open to new stakeholders who may be interested in participating.
Stimulating entrepreneurship in the governance of organisations
It has become fashionable to equate social innovation with social entrepreneurship. The latter, however, is a phenomenon in its own right, to be understood as an attitude that can be found not only in social enterprises (Nyssens, Reference Nyssens2006) but wherever initiatives and projects with a service dimension are struggling to develop and grow. In this sense, supporting entrepreneurship can be innovative in its various forms, ranging from those where we found start-ups for youngsters to entrepreneurial leadership in governing and reforming welfare departments. Our example from Birmingham deals with unemployed youngsters.
The Future Melting Pot (Birmingham, UK) (or TFMP) is a community interest company which set up the Youth Employment and Enterprise Rehearsal (YEER) project to provide business support for black and ethnic minority individuals who are not in employment, education or training (NEET). The main aim of participants is ultimately to set up their own enterprises. YEER is designed to provide business-specific training and assist young people to develop an idea for starting their own business. The project provides training, support and access to accredited advisors. The project received support from a local innovation fund which provided small grants to test out innovative approaches to the issue of joblessness. TFMP's approach is innovative in that it offers excluded young people, who would otherwise be hard to reach, a chance of integration by enabling them to explore the option of self-employment in an environment which is needs-led and where feedback is assimilated into the on-going project. The partnership development is a large element in the success of YEER and gives participants the opportunity to network effectively from the beginning.
Conclusion
Two arguments have been made in this article. First of all, we have outlined the main reasons for the significant gap between the emerging debate on social innovation and the prevailing discourse on social policy, social services and welfare. Then, after sketching the research background of this article, we have presented our main findings on the patterns that seem to occur time and again among the innovative projects that were analysed for the WILCO project. We worked on the basis that these patterns do not merely represent a special breed of services that can be used to address groups on the margins of society, but rather that these approaches and instruments could well be relevant for the debate on undertaking much broader reforms within welfare systems and services.
From this perspective, the challenge for social policies is not only how to support and finance such innovations as ‘apps’ or add-ons to existing service systems, but how to convert some of these innovations into blueprints for social policy and service reforms. It is interesting then to look at the prevailing concepts for policy change and large-scale reforms, such as the concept of an ‘investive turn’ in welfare policies (as presented in Morel et al., Reference Morel, Palier and Palme2012). Could such an investive turn not benefit from integrating the potential of social innovations? So far, these concepts have not even mentioned social innovation as a component in such policy changes. But what if social innovations are incorporated into the debate surrounding a ‘social investment state’?
First of all, this could nudge the social investment debate towards a reflection on more than just national and international contexts. The local context could also be brought in, with local political and administrative institutions, cities and municipalities serving as urban laboratories (Pollitt, Reference Pollitt2013). Many of the services and public goods that the debate on social investment takes in are administered very much at the local level. What about the role of the local level in providing better targeted investment in services such as education and childcare? And what about the role of local innovation strategies in giving ‘activation’ a new and more legitimate definition within the concept of labour market services? Secondly, local strategies, whether out of necessity or conviction, have played a leading role in combining economic and social concerns in both the urban and regional development concepts that they are responsible for. This is right at the heart of the debate on social investment. Thirdly, the main textbooks on the social investment debate (Morel et al., Reference Morel, Palier and Palme2012; Hemerijck, Reference Hemerijck2013) have, so far, overlooked the lively debate on new forms and instruments of public governance such as networks, partnerships, urban and local politics as well as inter-urban alliances. Here, programmes that support, try out and evaluate innovative approaches and instruments often play a central role. By paying more attention to these new forms of governance, an important dimension in so many of the social innovations that we have studied, one can surely gain a more complete social investment debate and a more rounded and balanced perspective on reforming social welfare.
