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.

Nijmegen City Report 733KB

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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.

Nijmegen report on innovation 729KB

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Where: Nijmegen, Netherlands
When: January 9, 2014

Event Description

On Thursday January the 9th, 2014, the Dutch WILCO team held its second grassroots event.

The event focused on the topic of co-production, one of the most interesting themes coming out of the WILCO research. Co-production involves citizens actively engaged with professional organisations to improve their personal situation, rather than being reduced to passive recipients. This is central, for instance, to the Nijmegen work corporations described in the WILCO reports, which involve collaboration with the long-term employed.

Participants consisted of professionals and managers from the care, welfare and employment fields. Discussion topics included how to increase the participation of socially vulnerable people and how to balance the requirements of professional organisations and the expectations of active citizens.

The seminar was co-organised by the WILCO project and the Dutch Association for Public Administration.

Programme

14.00 Word of welcome by Taco Brandsen (Radboud University Nijmegen)
14.05 Presentations by:
- Werner van der Wiel (manager work corporation Wijk- en Woningservice, 2Switch)
- Conrad Savy (chair Hobbycentrum de Nonnendaal & initiatiefnemer De Wijkfabriek)
- Jan Bannink (project manager social care, neighbourhood teams)

Questions and discussion

• 15.15 Break
• 15.30 Comments by Joost Fledderus (Radboud University Nijmegen) & Annica Brummel (Tandem)

Discussion

• 16.30 Cocktail
• 17.00 Conclusion

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Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen is one of the leading academic communities in The Netherlands. Situated in the oldest Dutch city, it has nine faculties and 17.500 students in 107 study programmes. It is a well-established centre for innovative, fundamental research. The research activities for the project will be conducted by the Department of Political Science and Public Administration within the Nijmegen School of Management, which has a combination of expertise on governance and civil society, unique to The Netherlands. The department’s research programme “Shifts in Government and Governance” focuses on changes and innovations in systems of governance and administration. It combines different disciplines such as political science, public administration, organisational theory, economics and gender studies, using both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection. It has allowed the department to set up pioneering research that brings together different disciplinary and thematic perspectives.

Of particular relevance to the current project is the department’s combination of expertise on governance issues with close knowledge of service delivery and welfare policy at the local level. The department’s excellent reputation in research is witnessed by its active participation in EU Framework Programmes, e.g. the Network of Excellence “Civil Society and New Forms of Governance” (CINEFOGO), the “Third Sector European Policy” (TSEP) project, the “Mainstreaming Gender Equality” (MAGEEQ) project and the “Quality in Gender + Equality Policies” (QUING) project. It is also connected to the interdisciplinary Institute for Gender Studies (IGS) of the Radboud University Nijmegen.

Taco Brandsen

Taco Brandsen is leader of the Dutch team and Coordinator of the overall WILCO project.

Joost Fledderus

Joost Fledderus studied Sociology in Nijmegen and obtained his master’s degree cum laude in 2009. In 2011, he finished a master in Public Adminstration at the Free University in Amsterdam. His interests cover broad themes such as social cohesion, social inequality, life course transitions, and risk perception in contemporary society, and he is especially acquainted with quantitative research methods. As a PhD candidate, he will use the outputs of WILCO for his own PhD project, which will focus on the concept of co-production.

Astrid Souren

Astrid Souren is contactperson for the EU on financial and legal issues from the Coordinating Institution (RU). Astrid acquired her PhD on science-policy interaction in 2006 from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands and has gained several years of research and education experience as Assistant Professor in Science Communication at Nijmegen University. She acted as research fellow and project coordinator at the Scientific Council for Government Policy in the Netherlands (www.wrr.nl). She developed knowledge and expertise on policy advice, science-policy interaction and coordination of international research and education programmes. Currently she works at Nijmegen School of Management, Dept. ICR (www.ru.nl/nsm/icr) on internationalization of education and research, including project management, and support on writing and acquiring international funds.

Francesca Broersma

Francesca Broersma obtained a Bachelor of Arts from University College Utrecht and a research master in Human Geography & Planning at the University of Utrecht. In 2009, she worked as a Junior Researcher at the department of migration studies of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) in Athens, Greece. Here, she participated in the FP6 research project IDEA [Mediterranean and Eastern European Countries as New Immigration Destinations in Europe], focusing in particular on the migration pathways of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in Greece.

Her general fields of interest are migration and urban regeneration. For her PhD project at the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen she will question the extent to which innovations in welfare can truly promote social cohesion among ethnic minorities in specific.

www.ru.nl

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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 Nijmegen 800 KB

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