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.

Bern City Report 381KB

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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.

Bern report on innovations 811KB

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poster_Bern

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November 6th, 2013
Käfigturm, Bern Switzerland

Event Description

The Swiss WILCO team invited local representatives of Bern administration, political institutions and civil society for a return of results. In the beautiful medieval tower « Käfigturm » located in the old city of Bern which is hosting the Political Forum of the Confederation, we presented our results on orientations and innovations of the Bern municipial welfare system. Since not all of our guests had participated in our interviews or focus group, we first presented the outline of the WILCO project. Then Sandro Cattacin quickly summarized the Swiss context regarding social policy and the role of the local level. He continued with the results of our research on the other Swiss case-study: Geneva. While only 150 kilometers away, Geneva and Bern have very distinct contexts. A first reason is federalism: cantons have numerous prerogatives regarding social policy. A second reason is the linguistic division. Bern represents the east and north German-speaking Switzerland while Geneva is on the border with France, in the French-speaking south-west of Switzerland. We presented more extensively our findings on Bern. In our perspective, Bern can be described as a «regime of innovation». A distinct consensus can be observed among the two leading coalitions: the social democratic one and the liberal one. Both have a strong focus on growth, and agree on a rather supportive welfare system. This consensus allows the Bern administration to implement innovations oriented towards what authors called an «activating social investment agenda». Our studies of values and orientations as well as the case studies of three selected social innovation show a clear trend towards a social investment perspective and towards «activation» as a guiding principle.

Sandro Cattacin concluded the presentation with a comparative look at the twenty cities studied by WILCO teams. He proposed a classification of the cities in four categories (or regimes). This classification raised a lot of questions in the audience and was a perfect opening for a collective discussion. The variety of positions represented in the audience led to an interesting talk on the future of the local welfare state in Bern. The discussion continued after the conclusion of the presentation, with a glass of Genevan wine.

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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 Bern 1563KB

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