WILCO - Welfare innovations at the local level in favour of cohesion,

Panel on Welfare Innovations at the Local Level: Intermediate conclusions from the WILCO project

10th of July 2012 - 13th of July 2012

Event Details

International Society for Third-Sector Research
Siena (Italy)
10-13 July 2012

Event Description

Panel format and composition
The panel will take the form of a round table, in which short presentations will be followed by a general discussion. Each presentation will in no more than 10 minutes discuss the evidence that has emerged from the research in European cities, focusing on the following questions:

• What are the major social issues on which social innovation in cities focuses ?
• What role is there for citizens and the third sector ?
• What are the major challenges and opportunities for social innovation ?

Each presentations will be based on WILCO working papers, published as part of the project. There are no separate abstracts, because it is a comparative project in which the same theoretical and methodological approach is applied to all countries. In this panel, four countries will be compared: Germany Italy, Poland and Sweden.  

Following the presentations, referees will pick up general points from the evidence and discuss the theoretical and empirical implications of the findings.

Participants:

1. Annette Zimmer (University of Münster, Germany)
   Germany looks back upon a tradition of locally based innovations in service delivery by local politicians and members of the local bureaucracy, building on capacities provided by civil society and/ or private business. Local innovations in service delivery used to be based on a specific public-private mix. Ideas, concepts and technology, developed and tested within either the private nonprofit or commercial sector were taken up by local governments and put in place either as public or nonprofit enterprises. After an era of commercialization and privatization, politicians and policy experts alike have re-discovered policies of service delivery that in accordance with the country’s tradition build on the nexus between public, private and nonprofit initiatives. The results of the local case studies indicate that new modes of local governance support the establishment of highly flexible arrangements of service delivery, provided by nonprofit organizations which rely on multiple funding streams, amongst those public money but also volunteer input, service dues and corporate support.
   
2. Ola Larsson / Marie Nordfeldt (Ersta Skondal College, Sweden)
   In the Swedish welfare society, the state has traditionally assumed the responsibility for most welfare issues, whereas the role for the third sector has been limited to representing particular groups or working with social issues of a complementary character. In trying to cope with on-going societal transformations, however, many policymakers now turn to the private and the third sector for innovations and solutions to pressing social issues. Building upon empirical evidence from two Swedish cities, Malmö and Stockholm, we will contribute to the theme of the overall panel by discussing how recent welfare policy transformation has impacted the role of citizens and the third sector in Sweden in terms of social innovation at the local level. The deregulation of the welfare field and the high degree of self-government at the local level would on the one hand imply plentiful opportunities for social innovation and a multitude of actors. Preliminary findings, on the other hand, reveal that the deregulation mainly seems to favour the private sector. Social innovations organized by the third sector are seldom recognized at the national level. Due to local path dependencies, third sector actors have been slow to respond to the call for reducing social exclusion by means of services.
   
3. Anna Domaradka / Renata Simienska (University of Warsaw, Poland)
   After establishing the new political and economic systems in 1989, many organizations emerged in response to the earlier period of prohibition that affected most organizations existing prior to the World War II. Some of the organizations established in this period were a simple ‘response’ to the new conditions. Others reflected the attempts to reconstruct the continuity of the pre-war organizational structure. Today, non-governmental organizations have different types of formal status, different types of financing and different tasks. Their adaptability to Bauman’s ‘liquid reality’ in a sense of changing types and forms activities as well as target groups can be considered a way of building new social capital in identifying and facilitating the fulfilment of the needs of individuals and groups. NGOs  participate in the construction of social networks among members of society, local governments, administration, legislators. They take part in the reconfiguration of relationships among the “actors”. Their role in the facilitation of adaptation and integration of migrants in Polish society, in helping young people to introduce or reintroduce labour market, in the creation of support for single mothers, will be the subject of the presentation.
   
4. Costanzo Ranci / Giuliana Costa / Stefania Sabatinelli (Milan Polytechnic, Italy)
   The Italian welfare has traditionally been based on third sector activities, which filled the gap in terms of services provision and human resources mobilization. Public actors have though externalized old and new services mainly to non-profit organizations maintaining a regulatory and financing role. This relationship between public and private actors has been referred to as ‘mutual accommodation’, because it permitted the development of modest levels of provision at the local level and supported the development of the third sector. The last decade saw basic changes in these arrangements due to the professionalization of organizations involved in policymaking and the delivery of services, and due to the implementation of “quasi-markets” in social policies. Based on research material from two Italian cities located in Lombardy, Milan and Brescia, we will present some findings related to the ongoing reconfiguration of relationships between public and private actors in housing integration policies with regard to migrants, reflecting upon their impact in terms of social innovation.

Discussants:
Steve Rathgeb Smith (University of Washington, USA)
Adalbert Evers (University of Giessen, Germany)