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.

Muenster report on innovations 844KB

The post Münster Report on Innovations appeared first on Wilco Project.

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.

Münster City Report 324KB

The post City Report on the Interplay of Innovation and Local Welfare System: Münster appeared first on Wilco Project.

The post Final Event Poster: Mamba Initiative appeared first on Wilco Project.

We started with a brief introduction based on our findings in the WILCO project as analyzed and described in the WP 4 and WP 5 reports. Explaining that WILCO wants to identify, analyze and disseminate innovations at the local level, we showed that the innovation process itself is accomplished in three different phases:

• the invention phase in which ideas are generated and basic concepts are developed;
• secondly, the realization phase in which the innovation is implemented;
• the diffusion phase, in which innovations are applied to various socio-economic levels.

In our presentation, we referred to the findings of the entire WILCO consortium and explained that with regard to Münster, local initiators for social innovations mostly come from nonprofit organizations whereas every 5th innovation is initiated by the local administration or politics. Only few innovations can be traced back to so called social entrepreneurs. Furthermore, we presented three identified types of innovations in Münster – new types of service oriented innovations, “network-hubs” and new types of governance structures.

After giving a brief overview of the research design, we applied the three phases of the innovation process to recent local developments in Münster. We identified the main actors such as the mayor and the marketing department of the Westfälische Wilhelms-University and were therefore able to emphasize the connection between the university and the municipal administration. The realization phase in Münster was based on the integration of different fields of policies such as economic and cultural, social or educational policy.

However, the focus of the current governing coalition is on diffusion of the innovations that were established over the last years, while the invention of new ideas is reduced due to a certain “weariness” of the coalition. This emphasis on diffusion is advanced by Münster Marketing in particular, a municipal department established to create an integrated city marketing.

The second part of our local event involved an in-depth discussion during which we asked the participants for their opinions as regards our findings. Moreover, we prepared three main clusters of questions concerning the issues of junior staff on the local level (if there are young successors who can bring fresh ideas into the city), whether Münster can be seen as a closed shop concerning initiatives of innovation and whether innovations can only be successful if they are part of the local marketing strategy.

Author: Christina Rentzsch, WILCO Münster

Grassroots Event Münster 15.04.2013 Presentation

The post Diffusion instead of Invention? Grassroots Event “Münster 2020″ appeared first on Wilco Project.

The Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (Münster University) is one of the major research centres in the country and one of the largest universities in Germany. More than 44 000 students are enrolled in 13 departments. The research activities will be taken up by the Institute of Political Science, which is part of the faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities. The Institute counts among the larger institutions of political science in Germany, and it stands out for its gender balance at the faculty level. The Institute is well equipped to host a research programme with the focus on the future of public management/administration because in the last decade it has developed expertise related to these fields. The Institute runs a Double-Diploma Program (B.A.) on Public Administration in co- operation with the University of Twente. The Institute is involved in the national strategy of the German government to strengthen civic engagement. Currently it outlines a state of the art on infrastructure of empowerment and inclusion of citizens in public management procedures in several local communities. The Institute’s emphasis on public administration research is completed by its fine reputation in the field of non-profit management and third sector policy research.

Through Annette Zimmer, the department has played a leading role in European related research activities by active participation in the 4th, 5th and 6th Framework Programmes, e.g. the Research and Training Network “Women in European Universities” (WEU), the Network of Excellence “Civil Society and New Forms of Governance” (Cinefogo), the Network of Excellence “Global Governance, Regionalisation and Regulation: The Role of the EU“, and the “Third Sector European Policy“(TSEP).

Dr. Annette Zimmer

The head of the team will be Prof. Dr. Annette Zimmer, Professor of Social Policy and Comparative Politics at the University of Münster. She was affiliated with the Program on Non-profit-Organizations at Yale University (USA), served as the DAAD Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto (Canada) and co-ordinated the EU-funded Research and Training Network „Women in European Universities“. She has served on the Board of the German Political Science Association and on the Advisory Board of the German Volunteer Survey. She is elected member of the Advisory Council of the „Centre for Social Policy“ at Bremen University. Recently, she became chairwoman of the Centre for Non-profit Management that administrates on behalf of Münster University the first university based master program on non-profit management. She is the author of numerous books and articles. Recent publications include Gendered Career Trajectories in Academia in Cross-National Perspective (with Renate Siemienska, 2007), Vereine – Zivilgesellschaft konkret (2007) and Future of Civil Society: Making Central European Nonprofit-Organizations Work (with Eckhard Priller, 2004).

Contact information: Annette Zimmer: zimmean@uni-muenster.de

Other members

Andrea Walter

Is employed as a researcher within the WILCO-project since February 2012. She is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Politics at the University of Münster and a doctoral fellow of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Andrea studied Political Science, Communication Science and Public Law at the University of Münster. Her research interests include the mechanisms of local governance, civil society and participation as well as methods of qualitative research.

Christina Rentzsch (M.A.)

Is a scientific assistant at the Department of Political Science at the University of Münster (WWU). She studied Communication Science, Political Science and Psychology in Münster and Hastings, USA. Currently she is a PhD-Student at the Graduate School of Politics at the WWU. In her dissertation she does research on the challenges NPOs and the third sector are facing.

Danielle Gluns

Danielle Gluns has joined the research team at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (WWU) for the WILCO project in September 2012. Currently, she is a PhD student at the WWU after graduating with a Master’s degree in International Migration and Intercultural Relations at the University of Osnabrück. Her research interests include social (in)equality, migration and education as well as international political systems.

Patrick Boadu

Is a student assistant at the chair of Prof. Dr. Annette Zimmer at the Department of Political Science, University of Münster. He studies political science, economics and public law in search of a Magister Artium degree. He is writing his Magister thesis about housing policy in the city of Münster. He spent parts of his studies at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Lisbon – Portugal and the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Florianópolis – Brazil.

www.uni-muenster.de

The post Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster appeared first on Wilco Project.

The radio clip can be heard in German by clicking here.

The post Radio clip: Annette Zimmer on “Münster Marketing? A check-up on housing, child care and labour market policies appeared first on Wilco Project.

We would like to thank the student production team and Prof. Zimmer for allowing us to share this piece with WILCO stakeholders.

The post Student film on housing challenges in Münster appeared first on Wilco Project.

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 Innovation in Muenster 1,3 MB

The post Münster City Report on the Development of Social Welfare appeared first on Wilco Project.