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.

Dover City Report

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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.

Dover_report on innovations 705KB

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Dover District Council’s Office
22 January, 2014

Event Description

Twelve of the forty or so elected District Councillors attended the WILCO Dover grassroots event, as did the Chief Executive. The participants spanned the political spectrum.

Following a short presentation by Dr Lavinia Mitton from the UK WILCO team we hosted a roundtable on the theme of ‘Supporting social innovation at the local level: Ways of fostering active participation by the public‘. This topic is of practical interest to Dover local policy-makers who want to explore ways to fill the gaps in services left by austerity cuts with initiatives to help local communities do things for themselves. It is also of concern to local decision-makers who believe in engaging the public as a democratic principle.

Feedback from the event was positive. Councillors said they enjoyed getting together outside of a busy meeting to discuss some big ideas and a number expressed an interest in participating in future research with the UK WILCO team.

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City Reports represent the first attempt at understanding how these cities have developed in the last decades and how these changes have contributed to the current landscape in the areas of housing, employment, family and immigration.

Please note that this report is still in the draft stage and that it is not to be cited at this point.

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The School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research is one of the largest departments of its type in the UK. It is made up of three main groups of teaching staff: the Social Policy and Sociology group (which includes criminology), the Tizard Centre (for the study of learning disability and community care) and the European Centre for the Study of Migration and Social Care (for the study of migration, social care and mental health). Teaching takes place across a number of sites, including Canterbury, Medway, and Brussels. There are three main research units: the Centre for Health Service Studies, the European Institute of Social Services, and the Personal Social Services Research Unit (which houses the Kent Centre for Criminal Justice).

The School has a strong research culture, embracing the staff at these centres and those situated within the Department. The Social Policy and Sociology group, CHSS, PSSRU and EISS were awarded a 5* in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise, with all staff submitted to the Social Policy panel. Only one other department in the country was awarded a 5* in Social Policy. In 2004/5 the 5* rating was raised to 6* under new HEFCE rules. The School’s research quality impacts on its teaching in two ways: teaching is by academics who are leaders in their fields and the School has more resources to put on its wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. External evaluations of teaching by the SPS group were ‘Excellent’ for Social Policy and 21/24 points for Sociology. SSPSSR also has a number of interesting MA and PhD programmes In recent years, SSPSSR has deliberately sought to strengthen the theoretical, applied and policy relevant components of its research portfolio. Inter alia, this has included recruiting leading academics in the comparative study of social policy, the European and gender dimensions of social policy, and third sector or civil society studies.

Dr. Jeremy Kendall

The researcher in charge will be Dr. Jeremy Kendall, senior lecturer in social policy at the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, and a visiting associate at the Personal Social Services Research Unit (PSSRU), London School of Economics and Political Science. He holds a master’s degree in health economics from the University of York and received his doctorate while based at the PSSRU site at the University of Kent. As Local Associate for the UK, he undertook all aspects (economic, historical, political and social dimensions) of Phases 1 and 2 of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project. He is a former editor of the journal Voluntas. He co- ordinated the European Commission 5th Framework Research, `Third Sector European Policy ? (TSEP) from 2002-2005 and is currently a partner in the CINEFOGO network of excellence (European Commission 6th Framework).

He has been recognised, by the European Commission amongst others, as one of the foremost experts on the third sector and social policy in the UK. His publications include The Handbook of Third Sector Policy in Europe: Multi-level Processes and Organised Civil Society (2008), The Voluntary Sector: Comparative Perspectives in the UK (2003), Third Sector Policy at the Cross-Roads (with Helmut Anheier, 2001) as well as various articles in journals such as the Journal of Social Policy, Voluntas and Public Administration.

Contact information:

• Jeremy Kendall
• Lavinia Mitton L.Mitton@kent.ac.uk

Other members

Lavinia Mitton

Dr Lavinia Mitton is a Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Kent, UK. Prior to coming to the University of Kent she was a doctoral student at the London School of Economics and a researcher at the University of Cambridge. Broadly her interests lie in two areas: the British welfare state and ethnic minorities in the UK. She has written reports on social security benefit fraud for the Department of Work and Pensions and on financial exclusion for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Recently she has published on Black Africans in the UK. She is co-editor of a major social policy textbook for Oxford University Press.

Nadia Brookes

Nadia Brookes is a researcher at the Personal Social Services Research Unit (PSSRU) at the University of Kent, which is located within the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research. Her recent research has included identifying the costs of criminal justice interventions for economic advisors within the UK’s Ministry of Justice and a project highlighting examples of innovative personalised services within social care for future in-depth research. She also coordinates service user involvement for a number of policy research units funded by England’s Department of Health. Prior to joining PSSRU, Nadia led a research unit at a London teaching hospital and was research manager at a not-for-profit centre specialising in innovation and outcomes in health, social care and criminal justice. She has also been employed in senior research roles within central and local government, leading on the evaluation of policy initiatives in connection with prostitution/sex work and also violence against women, focusing on the areas of education, health, and black and minority ethnic groups. Nadia has a postgraduate degree in social research and evaluation. Broadly, her research interests lie in the evaluation of health and social policy and innovation in service delivery.

www.kent.ac.uk

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