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.

Geneva City Report 279KB

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October 30th, 2013
University of Geneva,
Switzerland

Event Description

The local diffusion event on the results of the WILCO project in Geneva was held on the 30th of October 2013. The Swiss team invited local representatives of the Geneva administration, political institutions and civil society for a return of results. In the main building of the University, we presented our results on the orientations and innovations of the local welfare system and discussed them with our field partners.

First, Patricia Naegeli presented the context of the WILCO project and our methodology. Then Sandro Cattacin quickly summarized the Swiss context regarding social policy and the role of the local level, prior to presenting the one on Geneva. What we consider as distinctive in Geneva is the consensus on the necessity of a strong local welfare state, based on values such as humanism, collective solidarity, individual responsibility and equity. Globally, the social sector is seen as distinct from other public sectors. Furthermore, we see this sector as quite affected by ideologies.

The second Swiss case studied by WILCO was presented by Maxime Felder. He summarized the findings on the Bern local welfare system. Partly due to federalism and the linguistic division, Bern features a quite different context than Geneva. Sandro Cattacin concluded the presentation with a comparative look on the twenty cities studied by the WILCO teams. He proposed a classification of the cities in four categories (or regimes). As we expected, this classification provoked reactions in the audience and led to a collective discussion.

The fifteen participants, representing the municipal administration and political institutions, the civil society and the media, discussed the future orientations of the local welfare state. The main debate concerned the classification. Some of the participants supported our analysis and some did not. The latter considered that Geneva welfare state is not guaranteed and therefore that the regime cannot be described as making social problems a priority of the State. The discussion continued after the presentation with an aperitif.

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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.

Geneva report on innovations 266KB

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The University of Geneva is one of the major universities of the world (classified by Newsweek in 2006 as the best European University) and member of the League of European Research Universities. The Sociology department of the University of Geneva has a long tradition. Founded in 1886, it is one of the oldest departments of this discipline in the world. Many famous scholars taught sociology in Geneva, such as De Sismondi, Louis Warin, Jean Piaget or Roger Girod. Today, the department counts about 50 researchers and teachers and is the most important sociology school in Switzerland. The profile is more methodologically than thematically oriented and has its strengths in the multiplicity of approaches and schools represented.

The department has its own laboratory and many mandates at the international, national and local levels (half of the staff is employed in research). Past and current projects include research on public discourses, collective mobilizations, and social exclusion; public expenditures; public relations of government and administration; sexual interactions in face of HIV/Aids and intimacy dynamic; community health; migration, asylum, and integration policy; risk administration; evaluation of the coordination and service platform in the domain of drugs; and the integration of the excluded from the competitive labour market in Europe. In particular, the Department has been involved or is involved in a number of EU or ESF funded projects (currently ESSE, IMISCOE, COST Action IS0603, SANCO-Nowherehere).

Sandro Cattacin

Sandro Cattacin, the head of the team is a full professor and Director of the Department of Sociology of Geneva. He studied economic history, political science and political philosophy at the University of Zurich. With an Italian fellowship, he participated in a PhD programme on political and social science at the European University Institute in Florence. After his graduate studies, he started to work as a researcher at the University of Geneva and obtained a position as “Maitre-assistant” in 1992, as executive director of RESOP in 1997, and as “Professeur adjoint” in sociology and political science in April 1999. At the University of Geneva, he has taught on Swiss politics, comparative methods, political theory and social policy topics. From 1993 to 2000, he was also “charge de cours” at the University of Fribourg at the Department of social policy and social work (with teaching on welfare state theories). During the academic year 1998/1999, he was invited to teach at the University of Konstanz, faculty of administrative science. From 1999 to 2004, he was Director of the Swiss Forum for Migration and Population Studies at the University of Neuchatel, and nominated Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and Social Science at the same University. From the end of 2000 until 2006, Sandro Cattacin was a part-time professor at the IDHEAP in Lausanne (in social and health policy). In 2005, he was Willy Brandt Guest professor at the University of Malmö and in 2007 Guest Professor at the Observatoire du changement social in Paris (Sciences-po). He has published extensively on issues of social policy, social exclusion and welfare. Recent publications include “Migration and Health. Difference sensitivity from an organisational perspective”, “Why not Ghettos” (2006), Monitoring rightwing extremist attitudes, xenophobia and misanthropy in Switzerland” (2006), “Retard, rattrapage, normalisation (on the Swiss welfare state” (2006).

Contact information: Sandro Cattacin: Sandro.Cattacin@unige.ch

Other members

Nathalie Kapko

Is a researcher in the department of sociology of the University of Geneva. She got a Phd in sociology about the French second-generations at school, in the labour market and how social trajectories shape Islamic beliefs and practises among the youth. This Phd thesis was turned into a book published by the Presses de Science Po in 2007. Nathalie Kakpo also worked on the French urban riots and she contributed to a book written on the issue and translated into Italian. After her PhD, she carried on with her research in Milan and London working on integration of immigrants into the European labour markets and interethnic cohabitation in urban neighborhoods.

Patricia Naegeli

Is sociologist specialized in the field of the Gender studies, more specifically related to the inequalities on the labour market and the gendered positions and discriminations in the private and public life. She is a researcher at the department of sociology.

www.unige.ch

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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 Geneva 1104 KB

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