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.

Berlin report on innovations 705KB

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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.

The English of this report series has not been edited yet.

Berlin City Report 795KB

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WHERE
Nachbarschaftshaus Urbanstraße e.V.,
Berlin-Kreuzberg, Urbanstr. 21

WHEN
Thursday, February 28th, 2013, from 14:00 to 18:00

Event Description

Creative contributions by an “active civil society” –  citizens initiatives, self-help groups and and social entrepreneurs – are perceived as a precondition for social cohesion at the local level. However, innovative welfare services and arrangements request trust, dialogue and cooperation among different stakeholders. Based on the example of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg (Berlin), this grassroots event invited social innovators, local politicians and staff from the district’s authorities to exchange their respective perspectives. For this purpose, short presentations of six social innovations in the fields of child care, urban development and work integration were commented by “outside observers”. Thereby, mutual learning concerning both sides’ rationales, modes of working and constraints could be facilitated.

Documents

Social innovations between claims of autonomy, coexistence and adoption – PDF (106KB)

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17-18 December 2012
Berlin-Köpenick, Germany

Event Description

Three members of WILCO from three different coutries (Adalbert Evers – Germany; Renata Siemienska – Poland; and Laurent Fraisse) will participate in the conference “New opportunities or new restrictions: Social innovation and providers of social services in Europe” in Berlin.

The event is organized by the Observatory for Sociopolitical Developments in Europe on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth.

Please find the conference flyer here.

The conference programme is available for download here.

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The Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, is a full University with 11 departments, having presently about 24.000 students. Due to the membership of Professor Evers in two Institutes, research traditions and activities from two sides have to be taken into account – the Institute for Political Science, part of the Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences and the Institute for Household Economics, part of the Faculty for Agricultural Sciences and Environmental Planning. The Institute for Political Science has a tradition and experience in European Studies as well as in studies on governance, having installed lately a master course in “Democracy and Cooperation”. The Institute for Household Economics, on the other hand, has a long research experience with respect to issues of social integration and the role of the family and with studies on family systems and the third sector as parts of plural welfare systems.

The most important research projects carried out by Adalbert Evers the last years that are relevant to this project are listed below; except the first one, which was funded by a German research foundation, all others have been carried out in the framework of EU-financed international projects: Von öffentlichen Einrichtungen zu sozialen Unternehmen. Hybride Organisationsformen im Bereich sozialer Dienstleistungen (From public institutions to social enterprises – hybrid organisations in the field of social services; The policies of social integration in Europe; Changing family structure and social policy: Child care services as sources of social cohesion; The socio-economic performance of social enterprises in field of integration by work; The emerging design of local labour market integration – elements and performance indicators; The EU-funded Network of Excellence Civil Society and New Forms of Governance in Europe (CINEFOGO).

Adalbert Evers

Adalbert Evers is Professor for Comparative Health and Social Policy. He studied architecture and urban planning at the Technical University in Aachen, Germany and completed his doctoral thesis in Political Sciences in 1977 at the University of Bremen. He and his working group are renowned on an international level when it comes to issues of analyzing welfare mixes and different forms of governance with respect to social services. Members of the Institute are involved in continuous policy advice on matters of family policy, gender equality, combating child poverty and issues of strengthening civic engagement. In this respect Adalbert Evers has worked as member of a Parliamentary Commission. He is a member of various professional organisations on national and international levels (till recently speaker of the section for social policy within the German Sociological Association; founding member and Vice-President of EMES, a European network of third sector researchers, as well as member of the board of several journals in the field, among them Public Management Review, Voluntas, Voluntary Sector Review, Journal of Social Policy Research.

Contact information:

• Adalbert Evers  Adalbert.Evers@uni-giessen.de
• Benjamin Ewert  ABenjamin.Ewert@sowi.uni-giessen.de

Other members

Benjamin Ewert

Benjamin Ewert studied Political Science at the Philipps-University Marburg and the Charles University Prague. Since 2007 he is a research assistant at the professorship for Comparative Health and Social Policy at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. Benjamin worked as an administrator within the European Network of Excellence ‘Civil Society and New Forms of Governance’ (CINEFOGO). Since December 2010 he is employed as a junior researcher within the WILCO-project.

www.uni-giessen.de

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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 Berlin 574 KB

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