Adalbert Evers / Benjamin Ewert (Justus-Liebig-University Giessen)
Social Innovations for Social Cohesion.
On concepts and first findings of a
cross-country study
Paper presented at 10th Annual ESPAnet conference
Edinburgh, September 6-8, 2012
Authors’ affiliation:
Adalbert.Evers@uni-giessen.de
Benjamin.Ewert@sowi.uni-giessen.de
0. Introduction
Presently the political landscape in the western democracies and welfare states is
overshadowed by a banking crisis and crisis of public households that calls for quick and
deep going acts of reform. But it does so exactly at a point where public politics and along
with them welfare policies seem preoccupied with strategies of system rescue and survival
rather than any option for a different and better life of citizens. In this context the
discourses on social innovations that have in Europe finally reached the central policy
documents of the European Commission (BEPA 2010) and that can be found in the official
rhetoric at least of some EU countries seems to witness of two things at a time. On the one
hand the link to social innovations expresses the search for small scale changes and coping
strategies that work in spaces left for immediate action despite the seemingly frozen wider
systems and welfare policies. On the other hand the high hopes put so often on social
innovations in terms of small scale movements and local actions tells something about the
constant need for utopias in times of mainstream politics that tell citizens that there is no
alternative.
It is within this context that in 2011 a three year international research project started
that has the task to look at social innovations in local welfare systems, at their
backgrounds, characteristics and at ways for giving them more impact in welfare politics.
The focus is on innovations for strengthening social cohesion (WILCO: Welfare Innovations
for Local Cohesion). After some short initial remarks on this project, the way it conceives
its key issues and organizes the empirical work (1.) this paper will concentrate on first
findings concerning cases of innovations that have been selected and described so far.
With reference to a pool of 79 cases stemming from twenty cities in ten European
countries it wants to highlight communalities rather than differences found in a first
survey. Five key-dimensions of local social innovations will be dealt with:

the balance of types of innovations, e. g. between service- and governanceinnovations, foremost cooperative and mainly conflict oriented features (2.);

recurrent proto-types of new organisation/service models (3.);

innovations in approaches and instruments used, e.g. ways of addressing users, of
co-operating with other services and of organising financing (4.);

innovations in governance and action in the local public domain (5.);

innovations as parts of a changing culture of welfare, pointing at correlations
between an innovative “new generation” of services and the debates about
“activating”, “enabling” and “social investment oriented” welfare state concepts
and respective government programs (6.).
As it can be seen, the pool of examples will be analysed and discussed from different
perspectives. And in contrast to much of the social innovation literature it is tried to line
out for an important field of welfare what social innovations attempt to take up and to
handle differently. In a conclusive part (7.) the paper will raise some issues that are
concerning the potential futures of such local innovations. What about key factors for their
further development? How to conceive the interaction and co-existence of given
institutionalised local welfare systems on the one hand and the often shaky but as well
more flexible innovations? How can one conceive change and governance in (local) welfare
politics in a way that gives innovation a place? In the WILCO project work on these items
concerning what some call the diffusion and upscaling of social innovations is still pending
and so the concluding remarks on this will be questions rather than grounded statements.
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1. The conceptual and methodological background of the WILCO project on local
social innovations.
Before reporting on our findings on local innovations for social cohesion we want shortly
present some conceptual and methodical stipulations our work is based on.
The first and possibly most difficult one is concerning the definition of social innovation,
given the background of a long and diversified tradition of contributions to the larger topic
of innovation (Fagerberg 2006). First of all we define social innovations as ideas, turned
into practical approaches that are new in the context where they appear. While this is
basic it is not sufficient. New practices can be seen as innovative, once they present
themselves as promising, rise aspirations and attract hopes for better coping strategies and
solutions. Since they are not just a prolongation of what is given, challenging to some
degree their surrounding by new attitudes, combination of elements from different
spheres, their effects and by-effects as well as their further course of development is
fairly unpredictable. Attempts to grasp them should be sensible to that (see for this
position the early statement of Nowotny [1997], the later spiritus rector of the focus on
this topic in the EU social research program). By this it might already become clear which
streams of discourses on social innovations we do not share in the WILCO project. There is
one strand that sees social innovations as a different label for new social movements with
a kind of genetic code that makes them stand for progressive values such as solidarity and
participative democracy (Moulaert 2010). From our viewpoint innovations, while making
such promises, can at the same time attract attention and support from quite different
partners and become elements in varying policy-coalitions. We do not share as well a
functionalist position where the new items that are transported through social innovations
are seen as better than the “old” arrangements simply because they “work better”. Such a
viewpoint can be found e.g. in recent EU-documents (European Commission 2011). All this
points to still surviving links of parts of the social innovation debate with the older debates
on technological innovation in industry (see the critical reflections on this in Howaldt and
Jacobsen 2010). There the more successful new product on the market is as well the
better one. Against this optimist version that links technological, market and social
progress seeing a society´s development moving on a fairly consented line of “social
progress” we would argue for the need of social and political debates about what is
wanted, better and more efficient with respect to goals and needs to be sorted out not
only but to a large degree in such debates. To put it simply: there is as well a history of
both, technological and social innovations reaching from fordist innovations in work over to
McDonalds system of food chains, that meet rejection in wide strata of society, (see the
literature survey of Osborne and Brown 2011) This leads already to the difference of the
position taken in the WILCO project with respect to all those that link social innovations
tightly with a discourse on social and civic entrepreneurs (see for an overview Ridley-Duff
and Bull 2011) which prove by a test on social welfare markets to consumers investors and
authorities that their innovations are better than given institutional devices (see e. g.
Goldsmith 2010). Attitudes of social and civic entrepreneurialism are not necessarily linked
with innovations that take the form of (social) enterprises. Social innovations can well be
the result of reconfigurations in already existing institutions and organisations across
sectors, including such old-fashioned areas as welfare administrations (Phills 2008). And for
social entrepreneurship it needs as well active citizenship and a professionalism that
includes civic expertise.
What do we mean by “welfare systems”? We have interpreted that notion, used in the
contract given by the EU, as pointing to the fact, that welfare is the product of a mixed
and plural system of sub-components, wherein besides states/municipalities, markets,
organisations from the civil society and the community have a role to play. Such a notion
of welfare as a “mixed” system underlines the decisive role the linkages of innovative
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nuclei with the four subsystems of society, the state, the market, the third sector and the
informal sector of community and family (Evers 2005, 2011). Social innovations in the third
sector may undermine the strength of public rules and vice versa.
This leads already to the difficult notion of “local”. First of all, this points to the fact that
local settings, especially when strengthened by a degree of political autonomy given to
local municipalities, have their own histories and can to some degrees make their own
ways within a wider national and international context. Secondly the notion “local” adds
something to the degree it is a reminder of the impact of spatial dimensions. Inequalities
are not just a matter of uneven distribution among and missing acknowledgement of
groups but they make themselves felt differently depending how the respective groups live
together in the urban space, a neighbourhood or district. For lacking cohesion it is then not
only welfare but as well urban governance that matter (Gerometta, Häussermann and
Longo 2005).
The project had to operationalise how to study issues that stand for cohesion. On this
behalf WILCO has intertwined a socioeconomic and policy oriented approach. On the one
hand we look more specifically at three groups: young people at risk not to get into the
labour markets; immigrants and lone mothers. On the other hand we look likewise at three
policy fields that are of special importance for these groups while being simultaneously to
a considerable degree part of local politics: policies and services for occupational and
social integration; policies of early child care and education and housing policies, including
policies for revitalizing neighbourhoods (see for first results: WILCO 2012).
The final important point of clarification concerning the background of what will be
presented with respect to social innovations at the local level has to do with the basic
orientation of a cross-country study. Putting it simply, research that is making references
to different places, regional or national settings, can either focus more on differences or
more on similarities. Throughout the project and especially in this presentation of
innovations we have taken the second perspective, of underlining common trends and
characteristics in local innovations for social cohesion, despite all differences. Obviously
one cannot deny, that the context for social innovations is very different in postcommunist and western-European countries; and it would be likewise improper to deny
that countries with a lot of political and socio-cultural cohesion like e.g. Sweden are a
different breeding ground for social innovations than countries where there are no
consented politics and actors feel forced to look for their own ways of coping with the
pressures of change. Given that it is all the more astonishing how similar the forms, styles
and instruments used by local innovators are that we have found. We cannot explain this
right away but will come back to that in the conclusive remarks.
The next paragraphs will all argue with empirical examples to be presented; they will be
organised as follows: With respect to the five key dimensions of our analytical scheme we
will in each paragraph give references to examples of innovations that have a special
significance to the respective item. Altogether reference will be made in the course of our
analysis to sketches of 24 social innovations1 in the field of childcare, employment, housing
and urban revitalization. They have been placed where we thought that they fit best,
being aware that most of them are interesting with respect to several dimensions (e.g.
many examples on new service models have as well a government dimension). Sometimes
reference is made to one and the same example in different paragraphs. In order to ease
the reader’s rediscovery of examples throughout the text, all innovations are numbered,
1
Our analysis uses a compendium of descriptions of innovations that is the result of the work of the research
teams in the twenty cities. It is therefore not solely our own work that gets presented in this paper although
the responsibility for the arguments is ours.
4
written in italics and indicate the respective city and country of occurrence, e.g. (7) work
corporations (Nijmegen/Netherlands).
2. The balance of examples – service innovations and cooperative attitudes clearly
dominating
A decision had been made in the WILCO project to look in each of the 20 cities (two in
each of the ten countries - a major city /metropolitan setting and a medium sized
university city) for about three to six innovations covering altogether the three problem
areas (young people at risk, immigrants, lone parenting mothers) and policy fields (labour
market services, early child care and education, housing and urban revitalization policies).
The program has at its mid-term ended up with a catalogue of short (and some more
detailed) descriptions of altogether 79 cases of local innovations. The proceedings for
selection were simple. The first working phase had been devoted to an overall mapping of
the economic, social and political context in the respective cities, based on documents
available and a number of interviews with experts, policy makers and selected people
standing for the three groups and policy fields just referred to. In the course of these
interviews the research teams took as well the chance to ask their partners about
remarkable new initiatives and concepts they knew having been put into practice. Quite
often the same projects were mentioned by different parties and so it became quite often
clear where the innovative project that had made themselves known locally were to be
found. The balance of the final choice was then mainly influenced by the concern to cover
the problem fields mentioned above and to have a balance of both, smaller innovative
attempts (like e.g. a special support agency for jobless youngsters) and more complex
innovative projects, (like e.g. a project for revitalizing an urban/neighbourhood). What
about the balance of different types of innovations that resulted from all that?
One striking fact to be mentioned first of all is not due to a bias in selection but rather
mirroring the realities in the various places: The vast majority of our final selection of
innovations can be seen as innovations that are centred around new or different forms of
services; only about twenty per cent are innovations where modes of regulation or
governance are core-items. A regulatory innovation may e.g. be constituted by a (9) public
rental housing program (Zagreb/Croatia) where one can find in its centre a municipal
decision that aims at setting new rules for access to the local public housing market,
getting more space there for young families. The very few innovations focussing on new
governance practices are about new forms of local opinion building and consent finding,
e.g. a project like in (24) Maggio 12 (Milan/Italy), where the core idea is to set up a broad
deliberation process with “all souls” in the city, service workers, educators, family experts
and all citizens in order to set up new orientations and directions for child education and
care. The fact that regulatory and governance innovations are so rare should not be a
surprise, because the lacking ability of the local political system at large to act on
problems can be seen as being exactly one of the reason for changing a service or
establishing a new and different one in a special spot.
Secondly it should be noted that innovations can show up and develop basically in each and
every sector. However the clear majority of innovative cases take various forms of
associating in the third sector, outside the realms of public administration on the one and
private profit-based business on the other hand. This however does not mean that social
innovation is a case for the third sector. In many instances the third-sector based
initiatives are parts of kind public action where authorities from the administration and
different levels of state-policies make contributions as well, be it by co-financing or
cooperating otherwise. About one fifth of the innovations are integrated into public
programs designed by local, federal or central state departments and partly as well by EU
5
authorities. The relatively small number of work integration social enterprises and a few
projects for business start-ups designed for jobless youngsters to be found in our sample
does not fit with the high hopes put on this subject in the social entrepreneurship / social
business debate with its sometimes “messianic” undertones.
Finally, the clear majority of the innovations, partly due to their service-character,
combine their innovative approach foremost with a cooperative attitude, even when taking
a critical distance from mainstream service policies and their representatives. Only in a
clear minority of cases voice and advocacy dominates. These innovations are not to be put
simply in the traditions of social movements. Part of the minor cases are those, where the
preservation of self organized services of various kinds (information, advice, practical
help) is linked with simultaneously promoted forms of public protests – like e.g. in the (21)
MaMa Foundation (Warsaw/Poland), that leads in Warsaw and other cities its own social
campaigns against the disregard of mothers concerns in the public spaces. Most of the
innovations are about a kind of creative opportunism, which means that they look for ways
to use opportunities given, arranging oneself with the given powers without giving in.
3. Innovative services as cross-country models
Among the vast variety of our examples some models have been found recurrently in
different countries and cities. They operate already now since years and could be seen as
projects that are new but have already proven to work and replicated as kind of “prototypes”. Furthermore on their way towards mainstreaming they get supported in expert
debates. The four models to be presented and the examples given for local versions of
such practices can nevertheless still be seen as innovative insofar as they make a clear
difference to traditional forms of planning and service provision. They are all
characterized by offering bundles of support (instead of fragmented help) and they build
bridges between people‘s everyday worlds and given support systems (instead of top-down
intervention). Thereby their new service-concepts all include as well a governance
dimension since the secret of their functioning is not to be found simply within the
respective organisation but only by a view that includes their networking with other areas
and organisations.
3.1 One stop entry points
Modern welfare systems are based on complex and often opaque logics consisting of
individual entitlements, bureaucratic regulations and different rules concerning the
provision of services. The latter were characterized by „services organised in separate
silos” (Boyle et al. 2010, 7) for rather homogeneous groups, providing welfare users, after
they had overcome bureaucratic hurdles, standardized support for singular needs in
delineated fields (e.g. health, housing, employment, etc.). This somewhat onedimensional framework of service provision does not fit any longer people’s everyday world
experiences. Today’s welfare users, challenged by cumulated problems that crosscut policy
fields, ask for integrated support addressing them as “whole persons”. In order to avoid a
mismatch between service arrangements and users’ claims, so-called “one stop entry
points” have been invented in several European cities as “user-based innovation in
services” (Sundbo and Toivonen 2012). They are innovative with regard to its ability to
lowering thresholds into the welfare system for groups facing different challenges at the
same time. However, one stop entry points depend on complementing efforts such as wellestablished networks between service providers, transparency concerning the division of
labour and clear responsibilities. Service users must be able to rely on becoming passed on
to other service providers, if necessary. One stop entry points’ providers achieve better
results, if they invest in internal trainings and workshops that sensitize their personnel for
users’ diversity of needs.
6
A telling example, describing how people, being in immediate need, receive tailored
advice and support, are (1) Housing advice surgeries (Medway/UK). The offer’s major aim
is to assist Eastern European migrants, suffering from transitional impacts of migration, by
providing them access to housing advice and ensuring the availability of safe and decent
homes in the private sector. In addition, through partnerships with local children’s
centres, schools and colleges in the area where most of the migrants live, Housing advice
surgeries provide further help for their clients, e.g. guidance to migrant families
concerning welfare benefits in general or access to housing and council tax benefits. At the
same time, the Housing advice surgeries in Medway provides also advice for local landlords
being responsible for liaising with migrant tenants. In a similar vein, but for a different
target group, the (2) Service point for families (Münster/Germany) is organizing its offers.
While the Service point’s prime objective is providing advice with respect to family related
issues (e.g. access to benefits, child care facilities, medical support, etc.), the agency also
supports parents in difficult situations by facilitating contacts to professions (e.g. child
psychologists) and social service institutions in charge (e.g. child and youth welfare aid).
Furthermore, unemployed parents receive advice by a consultant of the local job centre
who is integrated in the service point.
3.2 Family centres in child care
Since the last decade, families – including parents, lone parents and the communities
where children grow up – have been refocused by policy programs after a long phase of
disregard or even suspicion (see as an overview for the UK: Lewis 2011). As a result,
different “family-minded policies” (see Clarke and Hughes 2010) emerged, partly
attributed with labels such as “early excellence” or “sure start”, aiming not only at
children’s need but also at parent’s and the whole families’ competences and self-help
potential concerning issues such as education and family building. Within many of the
cities we looked at, respective services are offered by networks of child care providers,
combined in “family centres”. There is one central difference between traditional policies
of child care and family centres: Whereas child care operates more as a substitute for
shrinking time to care and compensates difficulties in families, family centres aim at
families at risk to take over responsibility and to restore their own capacities.
An example from France are (3) Early Childhood centres (Lille/France). Lille’s local
government has recently supported the implementation of early childhood centres in
disadvantaged residential districts. These early childhood centres are multi-stakeholder,
multi-service facilities, which create networks and pathways between professionals,
childcare services, and institutions. The centres are a local way for governing the
diversification of facilities at the neighbourhood level, and preventing a social polarisation
of services. Moreover, early childhood centres provide a lively space for parents and
children with temporary and permanent information, special events, and activities
embedded in the neighbourhood. A priority of the centres is parenting support through
regular workshops and informal meetings. The overall coherence of such integrated
services is facilitated by receptionists, who inform and orient parents toward different
services and organisations. Moreover, a new profession was invented: Local childcare
coordinators who build synergy effects between service providers and help to put together
common projects.
Similar to Lille’s early childhood centres, the city of Berne pursues an innovative approach
concerning the shaping of interrelations between childcare providers and users and
changing modes of operation. (4) Primano (Berne/Switzerland), a pilot-project of the city,
started in 2007, regroups 80 different measures for pre-school aged children from 18
month to 3 years old. The aim of the project is to stimulate pre-school aged children with
different measures and to further their development and learning capacities. Parents
7
receive support packages in order to strengthen their educational competences while
especially vulnerable families are regularly visited at home.
3.3 Neighbourhood revitalization networks and community centres
People’s identities are considerably shaped by the localities where they live, work and use
services. Belonging to a certain neighbourhood or community is a significant source of
“urban pride” (Boyle 2009, 4) becoming visible, for instance, in people’s reservations
against top-town regulations by the city government. While devolving (some) tasks to the
“supplicant state” (ibid., 19) is a well-known strategy of superior bodies to preserve
power, the local invention of integrated socio-spatial approaches targeted to residents in
deprived areas is rather new. Across European cities, neighbourhood revitalization
networks and community centres contribute in “multi-faceted ways (...) to family and
community change” (Sanders and Munford 2006, 39). One of the challenges is to bring
together sectors and forms of action that otherwise operate apart from each other:
welfare services and urban planning, community work and support for the local economy.
Our examples introduce innovations from the Netherlands and the UK.
The Dutch example of (5) Neighbourhood companies (Amsterdam/Netherlands) is
committed to urban renewal in deprived districts where a significant part of the social
housing stock was to be demolished and rebuilt or renovated and sold on the private
market. A housing company, called Ymere, holding large shares of the local housing stocks,
decided to intervene in order to counterbalance further deterioration of the districts
during the transformation phase. The company runs easily accessible service points where
residents could go to if they have any questions or problems and whose personnel perform
additional maintenance tasks to keep the neighbourhoods ‘clean, intact, and safe’ and to
ensure its ‘liveability’. Furthermore, Neighbourhood companies provide learning and
reintegration opportunities for persons with a certain distance to the labour market (see
also below) by comprising a technical team which carries out technical repairs inside the
dwellings owned by Ymere, a neighbourhood team which helps keeping the public spaces in
that neighbourhood ‘clean, intact, and safe’, caretakers who handle social and physical
problems in the neighbourhood and a receptionist who residents of that neighbourhood
turn to for information and/or the filing of complaints.
(6) Community centres (Medway/UK) also address several local problems through bundles
of services. The community centres in the area of Chatham, Medway, are run by the All
Saints Community Project. The local surrounding is marked by a high level of social
deprivation, including poor housing, unemployment and health. Traditionally, the local
community has a distrust of those ‘in authority’, making it difficult for the local authority
and other agencies to deliver the additional support they believe is needed to address
deprivation. The community centre attached to the local church has become a trusted link
between the deprived marginalised community and Medway Council and other service
providers, delivering a range of services from house improvements to wrap around
childcare provision. Medway Council has used the lessons from this project to support
other church based projects in other areas. This has proved a more effective strategy than
the alternative of funding a community worker or workers over three to five years.
3.4 Work integration social enterprises
Work integration enterprises are real enterprises in so far as they are about goods and
services for (social) markets; they are social enterprises in so far as they create new
intermediary areas for work and social inclusion (Nyssens 2006). Basically, work integration
enterprises provide labour opportunities for disadvantaged groups (e.g. recipients of social
assistance, school drop-outs, unemployed women) being distanced from the regular job
market. Bringing this clientele closer to paid work requests flexible schemes, combining
vocational training and practical experiences. Hence, fluid boundaries between labour,
8
education and social support networks of addressees should ease a gentle integration of
the long-term unemployed. Innovations into this field have to be assessed against the
backdrop of “welfare to work” and “activation” schemes, making up the mainstream of
labour policies in Europe (see for an overview: Andersen et al. 2005). Our examples
concerning service arrangements and service delivery stem from the Netherlands and
Sweden.
So-called (7) work corporations (Nijmegen/Netherlands) are aimed at reemploying social
assistance receivers by offering them work and education. Basically every entrepreneur
can initiate a work corporation, as long as it complies with three conditions: it should offer
people a chance to develop themselves as a person; the service delivered should have
societal relevance; and a work corporation should be able to make its own profit.
Moreover, it is important that working at a work corporation should have a temporarily
character, which means that after two years at maximum, people should leave the
organisation. Because of this, it really differs from traditional forms of subsidised labour in
the Netherlands, where people could be employed for more than ten years. Though work
corporations should not be seen as a replacement of subsidised jobs, instead they operate
on the intersection of business and civil society. In a nutshell, the project comprises the
following innovative elements: For the municipality of Nijmegen, work corporations are a
possibility to earn money as a reemployment service, while for third sector organisations
that are familiar with subsidised labour it is especially the educational facet, the emphasis
on personal development, and the responsibility to reintegrate people in paid work
schemes which breaks with tradition.
(8) Yalla Trappan (Malmö/Sweden) is a labour-integrated social enterprise in Rosengård, a
highly segregated area in Malmö. In this context, the term “labour-integrated” refers to
two aspects: First, it is the general aim of Yalla Trappan to provide work for unemployed,
mainly immigrated women with little or no education who would otherwise have severe
difficulties entering the labour market. The second aspect is concerning the way Yalla
Trappan is organized, integrating, both, permanently employed workers and workers doing
an internship via the social services administration. Yalla Trappan’s users receive
theoretical and practical education and could participate in Swedish tuition, health care
and employment training programs. The enterprise provides the local community with a
meeting- and business-centre, uniting social and educational activities with work and
entrepreneurship. As part of the more commercial side of Yalla Trappan, a coffee shop and
lunch restaurant was set up, offering affordable lunches and catering services.
Additionally, the enterprise runs a studio for design and craftsmanship and also offers
cleaning and conference services.
4. Innovations in approaches and instruments
Is there something like a tool kit for innovators? Especially, in the service area (where we
found the bulk of our examples) new instruments have been applied with respect to
several items such as interacting with (public and private) partners in the social
surrounding or assuring a half-way secured flow of financial resources. Furthermore,
instruments have been developed for changing ways of approaching users. While studying
our case studies, we learnt much about the uniqueness (and limited reproducibility) of
innovations, being carefully adapted to the social environment where they have been
invented. On the other hand, some means innovations operate with are used recurrently in
different urban contexts. Hence, we will discuss six approaches and instruments, used in
several innovations from our sample ranging from financial incentives and the
personalization of services to educational schemes.
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4.1 Investing in capabilities
On the micro-level, a social investment approach means to strengthen people’s skills to
cope better and succeed in modern life and work. According to Amartya Sen (1993, 33)
”[t]he 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 healthy dose of self-discipline, have to be built up. Thus making people
competent needs more than money and services: The building of profound and “crisisproof” characters asks for in-depth learning schemes, addressing people’s full identity.
This is a lesson that can be learnt foremost from primary health care and health promotion
(Kickbusch 2008). Therefore, investments in capabilities are most likely happen through
bundled and integrated services, as examples from France and Croatia will demonstrate.
To combat unemployment amongst youngsters who have left school without proper
qualifications the European Commission has set up the concept of Second Chance Schools.
Nowadays, Second Chance Schools exist all over Europe. (9) The Second Chance School of
Nantes (France) has been created in 2010 and is funded by the Nantes metropolis, the Pays
de Loire Region, the national State and the European Commission (European Social Fund).
The school teaches and trains young adults aged 18 to 25 who are no longer subject to
compulsory education and who lack qualifications and access to higher education
programmes and/or to the labour market. The Second Chance School develops innovative
approaches, e.g. by cultivating strong links with local companies to ensure the best
possible training and employment prospects for their pupils. Attending coordinated
practical trainings at different companies has proved to be very important for youngsters
who are otherwise mostly without chances on the job market. As a consequence, it gets
more real for young people to live up to their expectations for work.
A quite similar offer, however, tailored for another target group, has been reported from
Croatia. The project (10) Her second chance (Varazdin/Croatia) aims to improve the socioeconomic conditions of long-term unemployed women through empowerment, training and
the development of business skills. Furthermore, new established self-help organizations
(women’s association) cooperating with the project, encourage marginalized women by
providing assistance in finding a job, raising awareness among members about vacancies on
the labour market and providing a focal point for information exchange between female
job seekers and potential employers.
4.2 Bridging the gap between professional services and people’s life worlds
Most welfare users worship values such as trust and reliability not only in their personal
relations but as well when it comes to interactions with service providers. Personal
relations, understood as interactions where people’s multiple identities and claims towards
service providers become shaped, regain importance in the face of complex service
arrangements, addressing users often in bureaucratic and impersonal ways. In particular,
the neediest margin of society, “bumping along the bottom” (UK’s Riots Communities and
Victims Panel 2012, 37), depends on approaches that bridge their daily lives with existing
support offers. Marginalized groups know less about existing offers, possibilities of support
and bureaucratic procedures and even where they know, they are more reluctant to use
them. In many of the cities, we have studied, this gap has been filled by individual (and
groups of) mentors, working as cultural intermediaries since they acquainted with both
worlds.
The so-called (11) neighbourhood mothers (Berlin/Germany), a project that is replicated
from the Netherlands, are most exemplary. Neighbourhood mothers bridge gaps within a
multicultural but fragmented district of Berlin, both, pragmatically and symbolically.
Basically, the project developed the idea of intercultural mentors helping immigrant
families with educational and also family-related issues. Neighbourhood mothers, mostly
10
immigrants that completed a special qualification phase, 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 in order to get
directly addressed on the street – the project attempts to establish informal support
networks and trust by building bridges among multicultural communities and authorities. If
requested, neighbourhood mothers consulate families by regular home visits free of
charge. The project may be also a springboard to the labour market: neighbourhood
mothers are offered to combine their voluntary work with a professional training in order
to become an assistant for intercultural family care. However, the turnover that results
from accepting such offers makes it difficult for the management of the project (the
Diakonisches Werk) to provide continuity and requests a steady recruitment of new
volunteers.
4.3 Networked organizations and coalitions in action
As stated above, social services like those in child care, housing and employment have
been traditionally framed in standardized patterns. Leaving those service silos, where
“people are often ‘dumped’” (Pierson 2009, 59), disregarded from their needs and
capabilities, requires new forms of cooperation and “innovativeness of partnership”
(Svensson 2008, 37). As a replication of “joined-up government” (Newman 2001, 104)
organisational arrangements have been emerged where support comes from various sides.
Though, the forging of coalition networks, dedicated to particular target groups, is a
demanding task. A German example illustrates how a diversity of stakeholders may join
their forces, when well-orchestrated and properly managed.
Labour market integration, a significant problem for migrants and refugees in Germany, is
addressed by (12) MAMBA (Münster/Germany). A key characteristic of the organisation,
founded in 2008, is that it serves as a focal point for networking activities among various
stakeholders in the city of Münster and its region on behalf of migrants and refugees.
Different organizations cooperate under the umbrella of Mamba: a non-profit refugee
relief organization with a long tradition in counselling as well as lobbying activities on
behalf of asylum seekers; a for-profit organization offering training and vocational
education programs; the educational centre of the chamber of handicrafts in Münster; a
non-profit organization affiliated with the welfare association Caritas that offers
vocational education and counselling in particular for youngsters and young adults facing
difficulties of access to the labour market, and the labour market agency (jobcentre). Each
organizations of the network provides different contacts to public, non-profit and forprofit organizations that fund, support or provide training programs or facilitate access to
the labour market via close contacts to the local and regional business community. MAMBA,
being a role model project of Germany’s integration policy, is funded by the city of
Münster, the European Social Fund and the Federal Ministry for Work and Social Affairs.
4.4 Stimulating entrepreneurialism: Social enterprises and start-ups
It has become a kind of fashion equating social innovations with social entrepreneurialism.
Yet, “so far the enthusiasm for social entrepreneurship has run ahead of its effects” (The
Economist 2010). Nevertheless, supporting entrepreneurialism can be innovative to the
degree that is about stimulating attitudes in various places reaching from those where we
found start-ups for youngsters over to an entrepreneurial leadership in reforming welfare
departments. Our example from Birmingham deals with unemployed youngsters.
The (13) The Future Melting Pot (Birmingham/UK) (TFMP) is a community interest
company which set up the Youth Employment and Enterprise Rehearsal (YEER) project to
provide business support to black and minority ethnic individuals who were not in
employment, education or training (NEET). The main aim of the participants is to get
enabled to set up their own enterprises. YEER is designed to provide business-specific
11
training and assist young people from developing an idea to starting their own business.
The project provides training, support and access to accredited advisors. The project
received support through a local innovation fund which provided small grants to test
innovative approaches to tackling issues of joblessness. TFMP’s approach is innovative in
that it is offering hard-to-reach, excluded young people an alternative by providing them
the opportunity to explore the option of self-employment in an environment which is
needs-led and where feedback is assimilated into the on-going project. Partnership
development is a large part of the success of YEER and gives participants the opportunity
to network effectively from the beginning. The project was required to evolve in response
to the different learning paces of individuals and multiple classes were developed in
response to this need.
4.5 Ad hoc transfers/flexible support budgets
After some examples concerning networked and enabling approaches the first instrument
we look at actualizes a rather old question: To what degree should welfare measures be
fixed by rules and regulations and to what degree should they are based on ad-hoc
judgments and related decisions on benefits by professionals? “Conditional Cash”2, as the
transfer instrument is called, promises a “fresh rethinking on the way money is used for
services and distributed to families and individuals for welfare subsidies and help” (Turin
School 2012). The core idea of the instrument is the combination of cash transfers with
individual “asset building choices like personal investments in good practices (concerning
education, preventive health, etc.)” (ibid.). Our examples stem from the UK and Italy.
The aim of (14) targeted discretionary housing payments (Birmingham/UK) is to support
people from areas of high levels of unemployment and deprivation in Birmingham in the
transition from welfare to work. Having managed to overcome hurdles associated with
getting a job in the first place, people may be faced with a series of issues, some social
and some more practical, which have to be addressed in order to support the sustainability
of the employment. Due to strict eligibility criteria many benefit claimants can only
receive additional financial support for a four week period. The project supports housing
benefit and council tax benefit claimants for the first twelve weeks that they are in work,
by topping up payments they already receive in order to maximise their chance of
sustaining their new employment. This is a low-cost, innovative approach which appears to
have made an impact on job retention.
The (15) Milan Welfare Foundation (Milan/Italy) was created in 2009 by the municipality
of Milan, the province of Milan, the chamber of commerce and the main trade unions. It
has the mission to support individuals and families working in Milan, disregarding of their
previous or current type of working contract and place of origin, who are in conditions of
temporary need for various reasons (job loss, illness, etc.) and who are not protected by
existing social measure and therefore are exposed to new forms of social exclusion. The
foundation intends to answer to emerging social needs and to support microentrepreneurship aiming at reducing economic precariousness. Therefore it promotes
guarantee funds to favor access to credit and mutual aid funds, supporting the analysis of
local social problems and offering seminars, training courses, fellowships and prizes. In
addition, the foundation gives access to micro-credit, through a network of selected local
actors (trade unions, parishes, social cooperatives, associations) that act as territorial
front-desks, intercepting existing needs and carrying out tasks such as a first screening and
take-up, counseling in forms of moral and bureaucratic support. On the basis of a
2
Titled “Giving to the poor and the needy in urban contexts” the Turin School of Local Regulation recently
scheduled a workshop to this issue (October 18-19, 2012). Case Studies from the US, Italy, France and
Bangladesh will be introduced and compared (for further information see
http://www.fondazioneambiente.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=317&Itemid=332).
12
preliminary inquiry of one of the local front-desks, the local banking system will allocate
up to 20.000 € to each applicant in order to overcome the temporary condition of need.
4.6 Special instruments for creating spaces for specific groups on housing markets
Traditionally, local housing markets get influenced by two approaches that in one or the
other way should work against segregation and discrimination. One approach is about laws
that regulate generally the rights of tenants and the other has always been about various
forms of promoting social housing, be it by special central and local programs for public
housing or by supporting housing cooperatives. All this stems from a welfare era where the
respective laws and facilities focussed on discrimination as linked to income differences;
they addressed basically already integrated groups with lower incomes, such as the
working classes up to the middle classes. In the last decades however, tendencies of
fragmentation have taken place, that have to do additionally or even foremost with sociocultural discrimination of various subgroups on housing markets, on private but often as
well on public subsectors; marginal groups, immigrants a. o. are concerned then not only
by lack of income (Combes 2010). Furthermore problems of housing access and security
can result from the fact that as well for those groups that are acknowledged as parts of
the mainstream life conditions have become more bumpy and risky. Hence at the upper
and lower end and as well within the former low-income-sector traditional regulations and
practices tend to disregard problems of access and support that are linked with
sociocultural discrimination and new risks. The challenge is to find flexible and targeted
answers. Obviously, measures for very specific groups will not solve the overall problems
(e.g. by gentrification processes) on housing markets. But developing them can be an
increasingly important part of local housing policies that combat as well socio-cultural
discrimination and the effects of new risks. Our examples from Croatia and Switzerland
can illustrate that.
The (16) public rental housing program (Zagreb/Croatia) “invests” in young families with
children who are the backbone of the Croatian workforce but are not eligible, due to a
slightly higher income, for the residual Croatian social housing program. On the other
hand, these families cannot afford housing loans to buy appropriate private housing units.
As a result, they are doomed to rent relatively small and very expensive housing units,
mostly without contract, being sub-tenants. The program improves the living condition of
such families by offering them a five year contract for decent housing for a lower rent than
on the private market. Thus the public rental housing program in Zagreb seeks to bridge a
gap between the residual social rental housing and the unregulated housing market for a
de facto socially disadvantaged group whose situation has not received much attention yet.
Recently, Zagreb’s public renting housing program has attracted the interest of mayors of
several other Croatian cities perceiving similar investments in housing as an incentive for
young, well-educated professionals who could be employed as public servants.
The (17) Unit for Temporary Housing (Geneva/Switzerland) addresses also, although
differently, groups at risks. Here the respective instruments are however targeted at
groups such as migrants in a challenging housing situation, divorced people who become
seriously depressed (and sometimes homeless) or unemployed with massive debts. The
municipal service offers them temporary subsidized housing (being quite rare in Geneva)
and takes their risk biographies, consisting of life accidents overlapping with health,
employment, family status and housing situation, into account. Furthermore, residents
may be supported by a service team (including caretakers and nurses) employed by the
municipality, dealing mostly with their social isolation. Instead of bringing residents of
various socio-economic backgrounds together, the Unit for Temporary Housing mixes
different disadvantaged households. This rather unconventional urban policy, concentrated
on low income households and high residential proximity, should contribute to the shaping
of solidarity practices between neighbours.
13
5. Innovations in governance in the public domain
The third category of social innovations, to be presented in this paper, concentrates on
“innovations (...) conceived and implemented above the organizational level” (Moore and
Hartley 2010, 53), namely innovations in local governance. Beyond innovative services
implemented by new instruments and incentives, often it takes also changes concerning
the structures and routines of the local policy system as a whole to renew policy making
circles. In reality, those systemic changes altering the fleshing out of welfare
arrangements mean nothing less than “cracking the hardest nuts”. Basically, driving forces
can come from two sides: On the one hand, they come from local citizens and service users
pushing innovations forward through symbolical new practices, campaigns and claims for
more participation, transparent regulations and better access to services (Göhler et al.
2010). On the other hand, they may come from politicians themselves knowing how
important it is to secure areas of consent and basic agreements. Our examples deal with
three kinds of innovations on the governance level: The development of consented
“Leitbilder” (visions and concepts) by participative processes of deliberation and opinion
building; the enlargement of stakeholders by giving weaker groups a voice and new
strategies of interest groups to define themselves and their presence in the public domain.
5.1 Integrated public concepts and opinion building
Local policy arenas, as others too, are shaped by those who set up the political agenda and
whose voices have impact on political decisions. Stakeholders, being part of this process,
have a say over issues affecting communities at the whole, be it concerning local
blueprints for cross-cutting integration policies or joined concepts for child care and
education. Challenged by claims for social inclusion and coherence, it has (at least on the
level of declarations) become a cross-party consensus among local policy-makers that the
process and the culture of how politics take place and the extent citizens are included in
(welfare) decisions have to change. As a result, in many European cities new citizen
platforms, opinion building processes and also decision-making procedures have been
developed. With respect to the trend towards an upgrading of participatory politics which
is surely ambivalent (see: Barnes/Newman/Sullivan 2007), our examples show the degree
good and/or open governance depend on shared values and willingness.
(18) Citizen Agreement for an inclusive city (Barcelona/Spain)
Aimed at “the common goal of a more inclusive and supportive city”, the Citizen
Agreement for an inclusive Barcelona is a framework contract between a number of
associations, organizations and the local administration. Its purpose is to increase the
social capital of the city, its capacity to organize help and stimulate self-help, to foster
cooperation and joint action networks, geared towards social inclusion. The agreement,
promoted and chaired by the city council, currently includes 422 organisations working 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 setting up of thematic networks of organizations, 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 "socio and labour integration network". Composed of a plurality
of local stakeholders, these networks assist people at risk of social exclusion and carry out
projects tailored to these groups. Being a new model of democratic governance in
Barcelona, the agreement is permanently open for new stakeholders, interested in joining
and participating.
14
5.2 Giving groups a voice
“[T]he public domain depends on careful and continuing nurture” (Marquand 2004, 2) –
without voices and civic action of multiple stakeholders, representing different interests
and values, the public domain is in danger of “hollowing out” (ibid.). Rather marginalized
groups such as ethnic minorities or handicapped people use different channels to articulate
their interests and to arouse public attention. However, most of those groups claim a
symbolic recognition and political participation in addition to redistributive measures
(Fraser and Honneth 2003). We will introduce an example of civic action from a Polish
advocacy group, showing how lawyers use their professionalism innovatively.
The (19) Association for Legal Intervention (Warsaw/Poland) was established in 2005 by a
group of lawyers, who used to work in third sector organizations and decided to form a
new organisational structure in order to provide free legal advising services to poor and
marginalized people. As a result, the association’s goal is to help anyone who is
discriminated and in threat of marginalization by providing indispensable legal and social
aid. The organization is divided into four sections: Foreigners section, Family section,
Restorative justice section (Mediation Centre) and ''Freedom'' section. The Association’s
main activities are to give legal assistance, to represent their clients in their dealings with
the Polish authorities and to aim at the implementation of amendments to the legal system
and social policy. Various examples of civic action and projects are conducted by lawyers
from the association, among them an information centre for refugees and immigrants
(providing free legal advising and assistance), cultural assistance in schools with the
significant number of refugees’ children (mostly from Chechnya) and the monitoring of
employer’s compliance to the rights of foreign workers in Poland.
5.3 New ways of public presence
Who has a stake in the public domain and whose concerns are largely ignored is also
related to historical legacies and cultural imprints. For instance in Germany, a prominent
example are the blind, whose fate aroused attention for the first time in the aftermath of
the First World War, when an association of war-blinded soldiers claimed public
recognition and special entitlements for their members. After the Second World War the
blind struggled for a drastic reconfiguration of everyday life through technical aids (e.g.
Braille publications) and opportunities for vocational training and work integration.
Today’s marginalized groups, as it is pointed up by the examples of women activists in
Croatia and Poland, face a similar challenge. Our examples, dealing with women as
mothers, come not by accident from countries which went to enormous turmoil: they point
to the fact that new problems and identities are as well accompanied by new forms of
action. In the formerly socialist countries answers to conflict and needs of working mothers
were functional and dominated by the logics of work. In these days it is about
acknowledging the multiplicity of roles and needs of woman as mothers that touch deeply
on cultural issues that had been largely disregarded in the former perspective of
assimilating them to a male industrial model. What is central is their image in public
spaces that have to be re-qualified for accepting and opening up for new messages. The
following two examples are not specific for post-socialist countries and not concerning
solely mothers. Throughout Europe there are many groups whose environments, identities
and ways of making themselves heard are changing.
(20) Parents in Action (Zagreb/Croatia) (the Croatian abbreviation is RODA) is a civil
society organisation, founded in 2001 by the group of parents as a direct answer to cuts
concerning maternity leave benefits. Mainly, RODA protects the rights of pregnant women
and promotes the rights of parents and children in Croatia. Furthermore, RODA
systematically monitors the status of social rights of pregnant women, parents, families
and children, points out failures, suggests ways to correct flaws and, therewith, actively
works on social changes. So far, the organisation has been publicly recognized with regard
15
to its commitment to adequate maternity leave compensation, the right to parental leave
and medically-assisted conception. Additionally, public awareness is raised throughout
numerous activities in relation to the rights of (future) parents, especially regarding the
healthcare system. RODA is the first, widely recognized, Croatian civil society organisation
which emerged in the broader field of family policy and is actively involved in advocacy for
changing regulations on family and health policy at the national and local level.
As a matching part of RODA, (21) MaMa Foundation (Warsaw/Poland) is the first NGO in
Poland dedicated to mothers’ participation in public and cultural life, their particular
needs, problems and expectations as citizens. Particularly, MaMa Foundation stresses the
importance of mother- and children-friendly public places in Warsaw. More generally, the
foundation works for mothers’ rights by organizing campaigns such as "O Mamma Mia! I
cannot drive my pram in here!"(demanding more public space for prams and wheelchairs);
other campaigns such as "Horror stories” are targeting employees’ rights, (listing examples
of mothers dismissed from their jobs); campaigns, such as "Baby at the cinema" (allowing
parents to watch movies while their children are cared by babysitters) and workshops for
female refugees take up various other issues of cultural discrimination. The Foundation
also runs a mother’s time bank, encouraging parents to share time and support each other
It supports local moms’ clubs by providing workshops for mothers, local leaders and
representatives of Warsaw’s most deprived districts. Moreover, MaMa Foundation
implements the project “Moms’ cooperative”, aiming at preventing women’s exclusion
from the labor market and societal activities.
6. Shared features of social innovations: pioneers of a new culture of welfare?
While innovations are partly defined by the simple fact that they represent something
unexpected and new, the topic innovation itself is far from being a new thing. Looking
back to the history of welfare means to find there a lot of organisations practices and
social inventions that once were new. And often new developments on a small scale within
the texture of society prepared larger new innovative institution building called welfare
reform. This can be shown e.g. when it came to the new challenges of reducing the
dangers of industrial market societies to manageable risks (Evers and Nowotny 1987), first
by a diversity of manifold mutuals and associations later on by reforms that installed a
mega-innovation such as the “social insurance system”. Given that background it might
well be, that within small scale innovations like the ones that get collected and discussed
in the WILCO project there are elements that might be significant for a new understanding
of welfare services and notions of welfare at large. And while quite a number of
publications on social innovations give the impression that they are innovative because
completely new, coming in a way out of the blue, things may be quite different. At second
glance one can often detect, that the background of innovations are facets of the same
“Zeitgeist” that is inspiring the great designs of welfare change and welfare reform as e.g.
debated in terms of key notions such as “from welfare to the enabling state” (Gilbert
2012, 85) the “activating welfare state” with its “renewed emphasis on citizens’
participation and agency” (Johansson and Hvinden 2012, 46) or the various concepts of a
“social investment state” (Giddens 1998). Perhaps the respective pioneers, communities,
groups, professionals and social entrepreneurs behind social innovations are well
acquainted and concerned with issues that play a key role in the ongoing public debates on
societies’ and welfare changes at large. All in all: small scale innovations can not only be
seen as a part of processes in local welfare systems and in special policy fields, but as well
as attempts to formulate elements of a new language of welfare. In the following we
would like to present seven key words of such a new language of welfare, helpful when it
comes to bridge aspirations for welfare change and innovations on micro and macro levels
16
(for a similar attempt of deriving larger welfare and service issues from an evaluation of
local innovations supported by the EQUAL-project of the EU see Vale 2009)
6.1 Addressing strengths and assets
In line with Sen’s capability approach (Sen 1993), the benefit people may take from a
social service depends largely from the interaction between the one who offers the
service, and the one who uses it. Claiming a new paradigm for social intervention, Vale
(2009, 7) concretises what an asset-based approach requires: “Solutions must focus on the
beneficiaries, and be created with them, preferably ‘by them’, and never without them”.
Within service arrangements trustful relationships based on co-production are more likely,
if the strengths and assets of service users are taken into account – as a positive source
where services can build on (Ewert and Evers 2012). We observed this strategy of enabling
users in many of our examples. For instance in most of the innovations, classified as “work
integration social enterprises”, taking given competences into account (and develop them
further) is a key element. In this respect, (7) work corporations (Nijmegen/Netherlands)
are a good example due to its strong focus on personal development. Likewise, (5)
neighbourhood companies (Amsterdam/Netherlands) are strictly asset-based by engaging
jobless residents with maintenance tasks and, thereby, re-familiarize them gently with
customs and rules of the working world.
6.2 Making services fit with individual life situations
In line with concepts of social investment and activation, the re-shaping of services can be
described as a steady process “from taylorism towards tailor-made” or from “collective to
individual regulations”. Yet, innovators contributed to the modelling of tailor-made
services by offering arrangements that make a “360-degree view” of users possible by
addressing their multiple identities (as citizens, consumers, community members, etc.)
and, therewith, their various needs at once. The innovativeness of tailored services stems
much from their ability to react continuously on changing life situations. Thus, they are
the opposite of traditional service silos, manufacturing “one-size-fits-it-all” products for
certain fields (health, childcare, etc.). In particular, it is the acknowledgment of individual
situations that makes a difference; this means, e.g. to take lone parents’ problems as a
starting point from where other support offers can be derived and conceptualized. Within
our empirical sample, the (17) Unit for Temporary Housing (Geneva/Switzerland)
represents most visibly this innovative approach (see also examples 8, 14, 16, 22) by its
clear-cut focus on users’ risk biographies. Although offering at first hand just a housing
service, something its users need most urgently, the project is about using this as a
starting point for developing service packages that extend to the rather miserable situation
of the customers be it caused by drug abuse, by debts or divorce.
6.3 Focusing on critical transitional stages in people’s lifecycles
The history of social services is very much about creating standard solutions for standard
risks. In contrast to that many innovations are about finding non-standard answers for new
risks. Due to the increasing role of transitional stages in people´s life trajectories such as
the one from school to work, from work to retirement or from motherhood back to
employment, the focus of interventions moves over to people’s temporarily vulnerability in
“passage situations”. Support is increasingly requested, e.g. by young adults, unemployed
women and future pensioners. In one way or another, many of our examples concentrate
on such intermediate phases, where people are “half in and half out” (see work integration
examples 7, 8). However, one innovation (so far not mentioned), reported from Berlin, fits
this category in particular: The so-called (22) job explorer (Berlin/Germany) project aims
at the creation of interactive relations between pupils and local companies by paving new
ways in the job orientation. Breaking up former routines of obligatory traineeships, the job
explorer project invites young people to discover a certain job practically, while local
companies have the opportunity to voice their specific demands on career starters. In this
17
way, mutual prejudices should be eliminated that make the transition from school to work
more complicated, e.g. those youngsters have towards employment in general and,
likewise, those prejudices employers have towards pupils that (often) belong to a less
educated milieu of long-term unemployed.
6.4 Services personalized but aware of support networks
Traditionally welfare services have been in line with the process of individualization. Most
rights are attached to individuals instead to certain groups and settings. Whereas many of
our innovations attempt as well to personalize services they do it in ways that respect
likewise the importance of the informal networks of their counterparts. Forging alliances
and coordinated networks of support with a clear division of responsibility among providers
is a shared feature. Innovators succeeded not only in meeting people’s needs through new
services but also accomplish to embed their support offer in the local welfare mix. At its
best, service arrangements are interactive hubs linking support from professionals, the
community and informal networks (see examples 2, 11). For instance, (12) MAMBA
(Münster/Germany), providing labour market integration for migrants and refugees, fits
this description well.
6.5 Upgrading the community component in mixed welfare systems
In a recent pamphlet, the local has been praised as “the very engine of public service”
(Boyle 2009, 19) where “ordinary users of services have something to offer which society
needs” (ibid.). By drawing a rather thick version of the local, based on community support,
interactive networks and reciprocal relations, the author conjures the healing potential of
neighbourhoods and small political entities. Indeed, without sharing his pathetic language,
one can state that re-detection how communities matter is part of the history of local
welfare innovations. How decisive this factor is becomes clearer, if we bear in mind, why
well-intentioned and rather strict programs often fail. They either do not speak people’s
language – e.g. by a pursuing an unreal combination of scientific-based agendas for change
and picture-book images of the addressees – or they put people under pressure by
demanding too much co-production and compliance. In sharp contrast, soft approaches are
rare where “learning”, “collective rethinking” or “behavioural changes” are conceived as
incidental effects that may happen by casual activities as they take place in family or
community centres (see examples 3, 4, 6). These may be seen as model cases for
upgrading community components in mixed local welfare systems. But there are as well
other examples that deal with a notion of community support that is more open to the
character of urban lifestyles. The trend, we have in mind here, is the urban gardening
movement (see Harnik 2010; McKay 2011) that seeks to slow down the “city machine” by
promoting different rationales such as sustainability. For instance, the so-called (23)
Princess Gardens (Berlin/Germany) are a telling example: the project enables participants’
free and informal learning without prescriptions and controlled targets. However, Princess
Gardens’ activists attempt to influence people’s mindsets by teaching them how to use
urban space ecologically and, thereby, reclaim a say in the usage of the urban
environment. By having created a huge garden area on former waste land in the centre of
Berlin, the Princess Gardens demonstrate foremost that sociable gathering and cooperation
among a heterogeneous urban citizenry is possible. Since July 2009, the garden community
accomplished the farming of agriculture crops, the building of greenhouses and the
creating of flowerbeds.
6.6 Integrating welfare and urban politics
The availability of outside resources matters – both for local urban systems where actors
seem to have given up as well as for those where civic action points to the importance of
local patriotism. However, instead of a simple either-or that abandons federal welfare
programs in favour of local communities’ self-help capacities; we argue that it takes
necessarily both: local action and resource mobilisation, and support programs stemming
18
from all other levels (regional, federal, European). Though, to reconcile ambitious policy
programs with localities, calls for intermediate organizations and persons. National welfare
policies and programs for early childhood education and care can be considerably eased by
the translation work of intermediaries that are familiar with local pitfalls and difficulties.
As the French example of (3) Early childhood centres (Lille/France) demonstrates,
sometimes it needs even the invention of a new profession, local childcare coordinators, in
order to integrate welfare concerns with uniform standards and concerns of urban and
spatial planning with regional and local differences and inequalities. Lilles’ childcare
coordinators disseminate information, nudge synergy effects and, thus, virtually supervise
the creation of sustainable structures for early childcare (see also examples 2, 4). Similar,
examples of urban revitalization such as (6) community centres (Medway/UK) are local
hubs (see also examples 5, 9, 10) that try to match urban and spatial with overall welfare
concerns.
6.7 Integrating economic and social logics
So far the trend of integrating economic and social logics is known from the broader
debate on welfare issues dealing with e.g. a smoother economic development, smart
economies and social investments (Esping-Andersen 2002; Evers and Heinze 2008). As we
have shown, some of our innovations adopt themselves to this kind of integrated
perspective, e.g. urban revitalization schemes as the (5) neighbourhood companies
(Amsterdam/Netherlands). Moreover, the rather odd dichotomy of social and economic
spheres, failing to take people’s everyday experiences into account, becomes also
challenged by non-profit organizations, offering their services alongside entrepreneurial
blueprints. Social enterprises, as (13) The Future Melting Pot (Birmingham/UK), succeed in
applying business practices and values (e.g. creativity and the willingness to carry risks) to
their social concerns. Primarily dedicated to people’s “economical inclusion, they invest
much in various soft “wrap-around activities”, e.g. networking, lobbying and public
relations work that help to foster a culture of mutual trust and dynamic cooperation.
7. Summary, conclusions and perspectives
Based on a running cross-country study on innovations in local welfare systems to
strengthen social cohesion, this paper has focussed on analyzing innovations found with
respect to their messages concerning social services missing and to be built, forms of
governance, approaches and instruments used when dealing with clients and customers.
Summing up our reading and observation of innovations in twenty cities across Europe one
can say that they altogether point to the emergence of and need for a new culture of
welfare services and governance in local welfare systems. While there are obviously
national and local specificities, many traits of these innovations are inter-national in
character

Overall we found a balance of different forms of innovations. Initial initiative may
come from all sectors even though the third sector seem to be the most fertile ground;
social entrepreneurs and social enterprises are just a small part of the picture; in most
initiatives public protest and advocacy plays a minor role as compared with pragmatic
strategies muddling through and consolidation by seeking support and building
networks;

Among the innovations there are some that have already turned into kind of prototypes, service models that can be found in different cities and countries alike – e.g.
one stop entry points, complex neighbourhood revitalization concepts, work integration
enterprises and services that have moved from child care to family support centres;
19

Innovations entail approaches and instruments that enrich and change the classical tool
kits of social welfare and service policies, as e. g.: moving from fixed entitlements to
flexible support budgets and ad hoc support; developing services that give personalized
bundles of support; creating new forms of social investments into peoples capabilities;

to various degrees such innovations entail as well innovations in public governance;
some innovations have a governance focus; groups organize and present themselves and
their concerns in new ways; networks and coalition building across department and
sectors are part of many innovative projects and sometimes even “meta-governance”
takes new forms of deliberation and consent finding in search for the public good;

there are shared features that point to the links between these innovations and posttraditional welfare concepts: services that address the strengths and not merely the
weaknesses of their target groups are examples for enabling welfare concepts; the
focus on critical transitional stages rather than standard situations links with the
debate on new risks and a life-course-orientation in welfare; the ways new services are
more family minded, personalized, but yet tying in people’s support networks
contributes to an upgrading of the role of communities in mixed welfare systems;
finally the ways many innovative projects in local development link concerns of
economic and social development exemplifies a social investment perspectives on
public welfare.
However such findings about innovative projects on the local level and the messages they
entail for the established policies that try to foster cohesion have to be debated with
precaution.
Each classificatory system of making descriptions, including ours, illustrating key features
by recourse to an innovation, tends to mask the polyvalent character of innovations; an
innovation that is focussing on a new service for families going beyond the traditions of
child care is as well to various degrees about changes in governance, operating with new
partners for finding complementary services; looking for innovations means to look at a
kind of eco-system of links and conditions from which one cannot simply cut away some
instruments and solutions.
Most innovative projects are constantly moving targets; their careers depend both on their
own goals and strategies and on the impact of the environment they are embedded in. The
flip side of the medal where it is imprinted what they focus on is made by the points they
do not take up because they think that these are out of reach. Innovations may e.g.
concentrate on the assets of local communities since they see no possibility to get a wider
based policy support; and the enthusiasm with start-ups for disadvantaged youngsters may
tell as well something about the overall scarcity of jobs and the tight rules of ordinary
labour market services.
Altogether this means that the focus and hallmarks of social innovations should be read not
only as new and additional possibilities to act but as well as hints to areas blocked off from
change. Traditional welfare policies that focused on state services and regulations may
have in the past overrated their role; but that must not mean to downplay the future
importance of these territories of action. Understanding the landscape of innovations as
the emerging landscape of a new welfare culture would then be a misreading. Innovations
can be understood a. o. as kind of seismographs and their landscape should be understood
as an area from where one gets kind of messages that are concerning the wider territory of
the overall welfare system. In other words: innovative contributions from outside the
realms of the political administrative welfare complex do not necessarily mean that the
20
future of welfare lies as well outside of it. Instead such a situation brings up new questions
about ways to re-acquire it as a sphere for action and decision-making.
This summary and the conclusive remarks finally lead to questions about perspectives.
They are concerning an appropriate theoretical understanding of innovations, the factors
that drive and mould them, leading over to the challenge of getting to concepts that give
innovations a place in explaining welfare change and finally in (local) welfare politics.
Much of the literature about social innovations is about how to use them, to make local
policies and the key systems for local and urban development more innovation-friendly.
This entails a number of open and hidden assumptions about what drives social
innovations. Much has been written about the key role of creative classes (Florida 2002)
and industries, hoping for their contribution to stimulating growth and for integrative side
effects on groups that might otherwise stay marginalised. Even though bringing together
what is usually separated is part of most definitions of social innovations, one knows so far
however relatively little about the alchemy of innovations where the witty and the needy
cooperate. A widely underrated factor is in our opinion the role of professions and of the
ethos combined with professionalism, especially in the realms of public services.
Innovative concepts like family centres or new forms of support for occupational
integration are often linked with good professionalism. By that we mean expertise
intertwined with a sense for issues of fairness and the public good. Such professionalism is
one of the hallmarks of civil societies as Crouch (2011, 158) has rightly argued. The
readiness to try out and support something new and innovative concepts themselves often
stem from the debates in professional communities. These communities have been as well
important when it comes to oppose trends where state and market take over by
managerialism and commercialization. While the much debated entrepreneurial spirit is
one important component of innovations, the “social” in entrepreneurship and innovations
needs likewise the engaged citizen and a kind of civil and civic professionalism.
This leads over to the manifold questions about the nature and dynamics of future forms of
interplay between professional politics and welfare administration on the one and
innovative attempts, networks and cross-sector coalitions on the other hand. Statements
like those of Mulgan, referring to the innovative and creative “bees” that need to find
supportive “trees” (organizations that make things happen on a big scale) (Mulgan 2006,
153) lead to questions about the “what” bees bring along, the “how” of getting trees and
bees together and finally to the question which tree is more or less attractive, issues
where the naturalizing image of Mulgan comes to its limits.
Recommendations from the WILCO project in this respect can take a very practical and
pragmatic stand. It could e.g. be recommended to develop in our countries as well on local
and regional levels kind of offices as they are to be found in the US within the Obama
administration. There, the Social Innovation Fund (SIF), pushed by the White House´s
Office for Social innovation and Civic Participation (OSICP) has collected and documented
innovations in key areas and linked this with grants for project support. Another fund,
created by the Centre for Economic opportunity (CEO) in New York does something similar.
While the first one however is concentrating on grants for imitating what works already,
the second one is more prepared to do risky social investments into new concepts (see for
this The Economist 2010).
Beyond such practical pathways that seek to deal by add-on institutions the often erratic
and risk-averse routines of welfare bureaucracies, dealing with social exclusion, there are
wider theoretical questions concerning the place to be given to innovation support
strategies in overall concepts of welfare governance. As the general discourse shifted from
government to governance, the former focus on central reforms shifted over to looking for
21
more networked and open forms of governance, including devolution and an upgrading of
third sector and civil society organisations as well as private partners from business with
social entrepreneurs, social and community enterprises among them. Accordingly, change
in welfare systems is then to lesser degrees debated solely in terms of government reforms
but additionally in terms of soft steering of innovations. One more traditional line is
constituted by issues of support and activation of citizens, the voluntary and community
sector (Barnes, Newman and Sullivan 2007). The more recent strand is nearer to the
market, concerning state contributions to the “diffusion”, “upscaling” or “social
marketing” of social innovations as social enterprises and social entrepreneurs. The
concept of the “social investment state”, once thought by (Esping Andersen 2002) as a new
wave of state investment into public services like health and education that pays off
likewise for inclusive and more equal living conditions and for the economy is taking then a
different meaning. A public strategy of social investments could as well be a renewed
liberal vision of a state that restrains itself to a loose regulation of welfare markets
contributing to the mostly private social investments by civil society and market actors
linked sometimes through social entrepreneurship (Anheier, Schröer and Then 2012). New
products and services brought about mainly by innovatory “civic entrepreneurs are better
to the degree they operate more effectively for the sake of the customers and of public
budgets under stress. This message can be received by much of the US-literature, e.g. the
bestseller written by Goldsmith (2010) explaining is idea how “The power of social
Innovation” could become part of a wider concept for social renewal.
This finally points to the fact, that the challenge for finding concepts of welfare
governance that give social change by social innovations a place and strategic role is of a
double nature, controversial not only in the cultural terms of old and new but as well in
the political terms of left and right. On the one hand attitudes towards innovation and
their spread are a cultural issue; they are concerning the eternal tension between the
forces of persistence and the forces that look for change, the routines of established
politics, welfare bureaucracies and their allies and networks and coalitions that look for
innovatory changes. And in fact in many fields, likewise in the WILCO-project, there is
evidence that both, persistence and the willingness to innovate can be found on the left
and right of the political spectre. However the argument, often found now in the debate
on social entrepreneurship, that pragmatic governance for innovation should put before
left-right cleavages is too simple. Because even in a coalition for change and innovation
that would cross party lines, there remain questions about how to steer and finance such
change – to what degree by choices of customers on welfare markets going for the better
product and to what degree by voice, political decision-making and resources of elected
politicians and participating citizens.
22
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