This series of WILCO Project local studies of policy orientations and values contributes to the understanding of the role of policy ideas, orientations and values in the interplay with innovations for social cohesion. Innovative approaches are usually not mainstream but can be linked to mainstream politics as part of a reform approach in the political administrative system (PAS), be co-funded by it or simply link to it as criticism, suggestions and messages that come from the innovators.

Certain concerns shape inquiry and analysis of welfare innovation in its political context:

• Plurality of discourses: for understanding the interplay of politics and innovations it is important to see them in a tension field structured by the juxtaposition and rivalry of different discourses;
• The impact of history: practices and values that guide action and politics are very much coined by historical developments and experiences;
• Differences between policy fields: While there may be often a kind of overarching narrative, shaped by national politics and dominating local coalitions, due to a number of factors, situations in different policy field may vary;
• Political administrative system and welfare system: understanding a welfare system as large and mixed, comprising of the fields family and community, business sector and third sector of associations we look at welfare developments and their role as part of a mixed and encompassing welfare system.

Barcelona City Report 684KB

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Local contexts are important in order to understand innovations and change on the local level:

Innovations are embedded in local welfare discourses that can be about classical welfare issues, managerial or encourage participation and pluralism. Such discourses will influence the political opportunity structures for social innovation.

In addition to that, there is a level of historical path-dependency that determines innovation success to some extent.

Welfare is a complex system that encompasses different administrative welfare units as much as the general political system. Innovations should be understood in relation to this complex environment.

Finally, innovative ideas might be restricted by the locally prevailing general discourse but may get much endorsement by a community of experts in a special policy field and thus reduce limits for innovative concepts.

Among the many context factors that have an impact on innovations and their further development, the strategies and value orientations of the local political administrative system are still of central importance. Local politics and governance include increasingly interactions with partners reaching from casual arrangements and agreements in networks over to cross-sector partnerships and corporatist frameworks.

Even though welfare innovations are in many ways nationally and locally specific, there are traits of innovations that are international in character:

Innovations entail approaches and instruments that enrich and change the classical tool kits of social welfare and service policies, e.g. developing services that give personalized bundles of support or creating new forms of social investments into people’s capabilities.

They entail innovations in public governance to various degrees, i.e. when networks and coalition are built across departments 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.

Shared features point to the links between these innovations and post-traditional welfare concepts: services that address the strengths and not merely the weaknesses of their target groups are examples for enabling welfare concepts and the ways new services are more family minded, personalized, but tie in people’s support networks contributes to an upgrading of the role of communities in mixed welfare systems

What role can innovative organisations play within these forms of governance and policy-making? Pointing at the innovative quality of organisations and projects can give additional support for developing policies that give social innovation a place in the overall changing architecture of welfare governance. This series of city reports offers an insight in many inspiring social and public innovations that offer plenty food for thought and further analysis.

Barcelona Report on innovations 705KB

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La Mina transformation plan

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WHERE?
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Egipcíaques, 15
08001 Barcelona

PROGRAM:

• 9:30 Welcome and Introduction to the Seminar
  WILCO Team Members
• 10:00 Challenges for Social Innovation
  Prof. Teresa Montagut (UB)
• 10:30 An innovative project in Sweden
  Dr Ola Segnestam (Ersta Sköndal University)
  Open discussion
• 11:30 Coffee Break
• 12:00 An innovative project in Germany
  Prof. Annette Zimmer (Münster University)
• 12.30 An innovative project in Pamplona
  Dr. Manuel Aguilar (UB)
• 13:00 Open discussion
• 13:45 Closing of the seminar

Event Description

The local level allows to define a specific social welfare system. The various actors involved (politicians, professionals, organizations or civil society) along with the dynamics and the institutional inertia, are capital for explaining and thus determining its own development.

Given the current crisis, it is now more important than ever to rethink how social needs are addressed. The project WILCO organizes the seminar “Innovating in times of crisis” and invites all people and institutions involved in social welfare. The seminar aims to be a meeting point for reflecting on the challenges of social innovation and, simultaneously, to find a place to know some of the innovative projects being undertaken in other cities Europe.

The event is open to the public although it is specifically aimed at politicians, experts, professionals, volunteers, researchers, and students. Registration to the event is no longer possible due to completion of all the available spaces.

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University of Barcelona, Spain
13 November 2012

Event Description

The goal of the WILCO Stakeholders’ Meeting was to gather all people interested in any aspect of the project and its analysis of social innovation in Barcelona and Pamplona. The format was informal and focused on getting the maximum amount of feedback from all participants about the relevance of WILCO and its results as well as suggestions on how to make it stronger. As in the first Swedish pilot event, members of the Spanish WILCO team were leading this event,  bringing together policy-makers and public administrators, social entrepreneurs, social innovators, journalists, students as well as other researchers.

Documents

Program of the event (in Catalan) – PDF (1239 KB)

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Founded in 1450, The University of Barcelona is ranked among the top highest public universities in Spain, in terms of both the quality of the teaching it offers and the productivity and quality of the research carried out by its members. The UB has 109 departments and more than 5,000 full-time researchers, technicians and research assistants, most of whom work in the UB’s 249 research groups as recognized and supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government). In the area of research, the University of Barcelona has maintained its position as the top Spanish university in the most renowned international rankings and it has continued to improve the overall position as well. As a result, the UB was named to the prestigious League of European Research Universities (LERU) on 1 January 2010, making the UB the only Spanish university to become a member of that esteemed association. In 2009, the UB, together with the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), won the distinction of Campus of International Excellence for our joint project Barcelona Knowledge Campus (BKC), and in 2010 the UB again won recognition for its project Health Universitat de Barcelona Campus (HUBc).

The research activities for the project will be conducted by the research team about Citizenship, Politics and Welfare, within the Center for the Study of Culture, Politics and Society (CECUPS) of the Department of Sociological Theory.  CECUPS is one of the research centers at the University of Barcelona, which is also consolidated by the Catalan Government. It integrates sociologists, political scientists and other social researchers belonging to different Spanish universities. Their common goal is to foster knowledge in this area. Recognizing the complexity of this challenge CECUPS and their members work at different levels. First and foremost CECUPS focuses on doing high standard academic research. At the same time, however, it also focuses on providing research training as well as on promoting their subjects within the scientific community and within the public sphere. The CECUPS is devoted to the sociological analysis of cultural and political subjects, in particular subjects placed in the confluence of those two realms or dimensions of social reality. In this way, and mainly from a comparative perspective, it makes research about five main lines: (1) Cultural policy, (2) Art, culture and territory, (3) Culture and social change, (4) Citizenship, politics and Welfare and (5) Comparative sociology of modernity. The most relevant research carried out in the topic of “Citizenship, politics and welfare”  through Teresa Montagut, are The Evaluation of Social Policies against Social Exclusion at the Local Urban Level (1996-1998); Evaluation of Good Practices for equality of opportunities for women (1997); The Third Sector and the Development of European Public Policy (TSEP, 2002-2005); and, in Spanish, “Ciudadania proactiva: los retos de la democracia” (Proactive Citizenship) (2001- 2004), “El impacto del Tercer Sector aragonés en las areas de Educación, Salud y Bienestar Social” (The Aragon Third Sector in Education, Health and Social Welfare fields) (2004) “Els reptes del Tercer Sector a Barcelona ciutat en l’àrea d’infància” (The challenge of the Third Sector in the city of Barcelona in young areas).

Teresa Montagut

The head of the team, Teresa Montagut, is full professor of Social Policy and Economic Sociology at the University of Barcelona. She holds a master’s degree in Economics and received her doctorate in Sociology at the University of Barcelona. She is involved in Third Sector and Citizenship research and participated in the Third Sector European Policy (TSEP) project. Her publications include issues of social policies, gender studies, voluntary and third sector organizations, and democracy and citizenship. She is member of the Centre Estudis sobre Cultura Política i Societat (CECUPS) Research Group of the University of Barcelona.

Contact information: Maite Montagut montagut@ub.edu, Web CECUPS

Other members

Manuel Aguilar Hendrickson

Sociologist, he teaches at the University of Barcelona. His main research interests have to do with personal social services and social care. He has taken part in several research projects on social exclusion, minimum income and integration programmes and he presently focuses on the institutional arrangements of social services in Spain in a comparative perspective.

Marta Llobet Estany

Sociologist, Lecturer at the University of Barcelona and a member of the Centre de recherche de Montréal sur les inégalités sociales et les discriminations (CREMIS). Her research has focused on community development, organization and mediation, the analysis of social work practice and social exclusion, and the squatter movement. She has taken part of PROXCIT project on outreach and citizenship in Quebec, Netherlands and Catalonia.

Cristina López

Degree in Geography and History. PhD in Sociology. Lecturer at the Unviersity of Barcelona. Her research has focused on Urban Demography, Housing, Migrations and Residential Mobility.

Gemma Vilà

Sociologist and Lecturer at the Department of Sociological Theory, Philosophy of Law and Methodology of Social Sciences at the University of Barcelona where she is teaching and researching. Her research topics have focused on urban sociology, urban and population studies and social structure.

Anna Escobedo

Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Organisational Analysis of the University of Barcelona (UB, Spain). Her research focuses on comparative social policy, family and social change – with a special emphasis on the work-life balance; the relationship between formal and informal work; and professional developments in care work and care services. She is member of the International Network on Leave Policies and Research (www.leavenetwork.org).

Sebastià Riutort

Sociologist, PhD student in Sociology at the University of Barcelona (FPU fellow in the Department of Sociological Theory). His research focuses on strategies and processes of social innovation articulated by new cooperative initiatives particularly in the field of renewable energy sources: the diffusion of their model and their institutionalisation possibilities. He has also been involved as assistant in the project RESCOOP 20-20-20 supported by Intelligent Energy Europe Program (2012-2015, IEE).

www.ub.edu

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This city report maps the problems of social inequality and cohesion at the local level, as the background for the research on local social innovations in the subsequent part of the project. The report includes

• (1) an analysis of the main characteristics and trends of the local labour market (main sectors, employment and unemployment levels, groups of population mainly affected by long-term unemployment);

• (2) an analysis of demographic structure of the population and of the trends taking place in the preceding ten years (proportion of the elderly, fertility and natality rates, proportion of immigrants and their distribution in the urban territory, etc.);

• (3) an analysis of the housing market, with special attention to critical situations such as overcrowding, difficult affordability, evictions, homelessness;

• (4) an analysis of migration trends, of migrants’ flows into the city, of the composition of migrant population, its features, changes and possible risks of exclusion and segregation.

Social Welfare in Barcelona 1452

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