To identify innovative practices in European cities and the factors that make them emerge and spread;

To set them against the context of current social problems and urban policies;

To make recommendations how to encourage local social innovation.

The Final report outlines findings with regards to emerging social welfare innovations; social exclusion and vulnerability; to urban welfare governance. It draws conclusions about sustainability and diffusion of social innovations and makes recommendations for EU-funded research on social innovation.

You can download the WILCO final report here.

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• finding models, features and trends in local social innovation in support of social cohesion that appear across Europe despite national/local differences;
• looking at local contexts and welfare systems: what are key factors for diffusion and upgrading of such innovations?

In a nutshell, WILCO aimed to examine, through cross-national comparative research, how local welfare systems affect social inequalities and how they favour social cohesion, with a special focus on the missing link between innovations at the local level and their successful transfer to and implementation in other settings.

This comparative report on social innovations in European cities consists of two parts. The first part clarifies the intellectual basis and the practical guidelines as they have been developed in order to find out and analyse innovations in the twenty cities studied. Four general aspects are addressed in this first part

1. The understanding of social innovations;
2. Methods to sort out local examples of social innovation;
3. Ways of mapping the context of selected innovations;
4. Guidelines for ways of presenting and analysing the innovations.

n the second part, a structured overview is presented on what we see as the main recurrent patterns of approaches and instruments as they show up in the descriptions of local innovations presented in the book. This major part of the introduction represents what one might call a possible way of reading and understanding the innovations from a social policy perspective. What are these innovations offering in terms of potential lessons to be learned by (local) social policies and those engaged in developing (local) social services that work better for social cohesion?

Please download the report here: Comparative Report Social Innovations

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The comparative analysis among similar situations in different cities clarifies local factors influencing why and how people get into these situations (or are protected from them). In contrast to the city reports, the results of the comparison are not organised geographically, but by policy area and target group.

This report has joined the EMES Working Papers series and can be downloaded by clicking here.

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This series of reports describes innovative projects in the areas of housing, employment, family care and immigrant integration in 20 cities across Europe. Each report describes and assesses local innovations in relation to process, partners and stakeholders, and level of embededdness in the local welfare system.

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.

• Berlin (DE) report on innovations 705 KB
• Muenster (DE) report on innovations 1,1 MB
• Dover (GB) report on innovations 705 KB 705KB
• Birmingham (GB) report on innovations 610 KB
• Lille (FR) report on innovations 717 KB
• Nantes (FR) report on innovations 729 KB
• Amsterdam (NL) report on innovations 819 KB
• Nijmegen (NL) report on innovation 729 KB
• Pamplona (ES) report on innovations 1,1 MB
• Barcelona (ES) Report on innovations 705 KB
• Warsaw (PL) report on innovations 758 KB
• Plock (PL) report on innovations 721 KB
• Varadzin (HR) report on innovations 725 KB
• Zagreb (HR) report on innovations 676KB
• Malmö (SE) report on innovations 659KB
• Stockholm (SE) report on innovations 745KB
• Brescia (IT) report on innovations 807KB
• Milan (IT) report on innovation 1,2MB
• Geneva (CH) report on innovations 266KB
• Bern (CH) report on innovations 807KB

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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.

Amsterdam (NL) 385KB

Nijmegen (NL) 733KB

Milan (IT) 414KB

Brescia (IT) 729KB

Münster (DE) 324KB

Berlin (DE) 795KB

Lille (FR) 647KB

Nantes (FR) 696KB

Zagreb (HR) 336KB

Varazdin (HR) 270KB

Plock (PL) 500KB

Warsaw (PL) 492KB

Barcelona (ES) 684KB

Pamplona (ES) 561KB

Stockholm (SE) 795KB

Malmö (SE) 795KB

Bern (CH) 381KB

Geneva (CH) 279KB

Dover (GB) 725KB

Birmingham (GB) 602KB

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This series of 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 reports include

• (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.

Malmö SE

Stockholm SE

Barcelona SP

Birmingham UK

Geneva CH

Bern CH

Warsaw PL

Plock PL

Milan IT

Brescia IT

Muenster DE

Berlin DE

Nantes FR

Lille FR

Varazdin HR

Zagreb HR

Amsterdam NL

Nijmegen NL

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Summary: Governments have difficulty in dealing with rising public discontent. Recent years have seen attempts to encourage and embrace civil society. Surveying empirical evidence from public administration research, we argue that such an approach to public governance is likely to be ineffective and possibly dangerous. The recognition of mutual dependence, a dialogue with the alternative civil society and co-production emerge as more promising directions for restoring public trust.

This Policy Brief is supported by WILCO and the European Group of Public Administration (EGPA).

Documents

A European Spring? Addressing the Public Discontent in Society - 219 KB

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The main result of this event is the “Social Innovation Research in the European Union: Approaches, findings and future directions” Policy Review, which has produced a systematic overview of research findings of 17 comparative European projects in the area of social innovation.

The review focuses on how these projects address social innovation in terms of theory, methodology, policy areas, actors, and level of analysis with the aim of bringing the results to the attention of policymakers, wider groups of stakeholders and the broader public in a comprehensive way. The report makes substantial recommendations for future research practices on social innovation.

This Policy Review is the result of a joint initiative of the European Commission, DG Research & Innovation, Unit ‘Social Sciences and Humanities’, and the FP7 project WILCO – ‘Welfare innovations at the local level in favour of cohesion’.

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European Union-funded research can play a crucial role in encouraging social innovation. There is hardly any other funder that supports comparative research on this scale. Moreover, the European Union encourages both academic excellence and practical application of the results, whereas other funders tend to lean heavily towards the former (e.g. national science foundations) or the latter (businesses and governments). This is why the choices made in Horizon2020 are so crucial.

The paper makes a number of recommendations to the European Union:

1. To devote sufficient funds for social innovation in Horizon 2020, including funds for transfer and dissemination.
2. To involve all stakeholders (the scientific community, civil society and the public and private sectors) in identifying and defining research topics on social innovation.
3. To address at least the following key themes in its research funding:
   • The clarification of the relationship between technological and social innovation.
   • The impact and outcomes of social innovations on urgent problems in contemporary society.
   • The measurement and evaluation of social innovations.
   • The link between research and capacity building.
4. To encourage more collaboration, both between European Union-funded projects and between academics and practitioners.
5. To increase the flexibility within projects, to allow project managers more scope for responding to stakeholders and addressing emerging needs on an on-going basis.

Read the full position paper: WILCO Position Paper Social Innovation

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Documents

WILCO National Report UK 1170KB
WILCO National Report Italy 1309
WILCO National Report Sweden 1196KB
WILCO National Reports Netherlands 1167KB
WILCO National Report Croatia 1247KB
WILCO National Report Spain 1443KB
WILCO National Report Switzerland1077KB
WILCO National Report Germany 1257KB
WILCO National Report Poland 1351KB
WILCO National Report France 413KB

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