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.

Stockholm report on innovations 745KB

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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.

Stockholm City Report 795KB

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Ersta Sköndal College University, Stockholm, Sweden
November 6, 2012

Event Description

Sweden was the first country to host a WILCO National Grassroots’ Event. In the spirit of collaboration and synergy-building that WILCO promotes, the Swedish member of the consortium, Ersta Sköndal College University, held this meeting around the WILCO project during a broader two-day conference on civil society and local welfare in partnership with Sektor3 and Kista Folkhögskola.

There was a video presentation on “Welfare mixes, governance, and social services at the local level in Europe” by Adalbert Evers, one of the German members of WILCO and Professor of Comparative Health and Social Policy at Justus-Liebig University (Germany). The presentation was followed by feedback from commentators.

The goal of the WILCO Grassroots Events was to gather all people interested in any aspect of the project and its analysis of social innovation in Malmö and Stockholm. The format was informal and focused on getting the maximum amount of feedback from all participants about the relevance of WILCO and its results as well as suggestions on how to make it stronger. The Swedish members of the WILCO team led this event that brought together policy-makers and public administrators, social entrepreneurs, social innovators, journalists and social media representatives, students as well as other researchers.

Documents

Poster of the event – 98KB

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Ersta Sköndal University College (ESUC) is a private university college. ESUC offer education at basic and advanced level in the caring sciences, social work, psychotherapy, deaconry, church music and theology. Research at ESUC is primarily centred around social and care sciences and research of civil society. The pioneering character in the Swedish context of some of this research has given the department a leading role in research on non-profit organisations and voluntary work in Sweden. The research department is multidisciplinary, such as social work, sociology, political science, theology, history, social anthropology, and social and economic geography.

The department endeavours to create and maintain good, long-term relations with research departments at other universities. At present there are collaborations with, among others, Stockholm University, Lund University, Uppsala University, Linköping University and Åbo Akademi University in Finland, Roskilde University in Denmark and University of California, Berkely, USA. Recent projects include Aspects of Citizenship. A longitudinal study on civic involvement (five population studies carried through from 1993 to 2009); State and Civil Society in Northern Europe: The Swedish Model Reconsidered; Mental health and self-help in civil society. A study on self-help and rehabilitation for people with mental illness in USA and Sweden; Civil Society in a Scandinavian Welfare State Context – Trends in Informal Care and Volunteering. The Department participated as a Swedish partner in The CINEFOGO Network of Excellence.

Marie Nordfeldt

The researcher in charge will be Ass. Prof. Marie Nordfeldt, at Dept. of Civil Society Studies at ESUC. She has a PhD in Social and Economic Geography from Uppsala University (Sweden). She works as a researcher and lecturer at Ersta Sköndal University College. Main focuses for her research have been relations between civil society organizations and public sector, especially at the local level, and issues of social exclusion and homelessness. She participated in an interdisciplinary collaborative research project – Third Sector European Policy (TSEP) – involving nine European countries. She has also participated in Nordic and Swedish research projects studying local welfare systems with comparative perspectives. For the moment, Marie Nordfeldt is project leader of a following up study of the Swedish “compact” that was agreed between the state and civil society organizations in 2008.

Contact information: Marie Nordfeldt. marie.nordfeldt@esh.se

Other members

Lars Svedberg

Lars Svedberg, Professor and Research Director, Dept. of Civil Society Studies at Ersta Sköndal University College. His main research fields are civil society, volunteering, citizenship and marginalisation. Recent publications: with Lars Trägårdh (in press) Social Rights vs Individual Rights. The Case of Sweden. In Evers, A. and Guillemard A-M. (eds.) Social Policy and Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. With Karin Gavelin, (2011). Estimating the Scope and Magnitude of Volunteerism Worldwide: A review of multinational data on volunteering.A UN-report Stockholm: Ersta Sköndal University College. With Lars Skov Henriksen (2010). Guest editors and authors of Volunteering and Social Activism: Moving Beyond the Traditional Divide? In Journal of Civil Society, v. 6, no 2. With Lars-Erik Olsson (2010). Civil Society and Welfare Provision in Sweden Is There Such a Thing? In Zimmer, A. and Evers, E. (eds.) Third Society Organizations Facing Turbulent Environments: Sports, Culture and Social Services in Germany, Italy, U.K:, Poland and Sweden. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag. lars.svedberg@esh.se

Ola Segnestam Larsson

Ola Segnestam Larsson has a PhD in organization and management from the School of Business and Economics, Åbo Akademi University. During the last years, Ola has worked with civil society research at the Institute for Civil Society Studies, Ersta Sköndal University College. ola.segnestam-larsson@esh.se

Anna Carrigan

Anna Carrigan is the research assistant of the Swedish team. She is a Master Student in Social Work at Ersta Sköndal University.

www.esh.se

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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 Stockholm 1514 KB

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