Local Welfare Systems: A Challenge for Social Cohesion

Abstract

In recent decades, local welfare systems have been emerging in many Western countries as a consequence of bottom–up and top–down transformative pressures. Local welfare systems are defined as dynamic arrangements in which the specific local socioeconomic and cultural conditions give rise to different mixes of formal and informal actors, public or not, involved in the provision of welfare resources. This article presents some of the most important implications related to the emergence of local welfare systems and the challenges they face in seeking to build social cohesion. After a brief description of the reasons that justify a local approach to welfare, an account is provided of the scientific debate on local welfare and an indication given of the possible relations and tensions between the emergence of local welfare systems and the production of social cohesion.

1. Introduction

The transformative processes that impacted industrialised countries from the 1960s to the 1990s have produced an economic and political crisis of welfare systems and have focused attention on the role of local contexts in favouring economic development and citizens’ well-being. Different factors have contributed to this crisis: the difficulty in financing large sets of welfare measures for populations which are becoming increasingly demanding of support; the lack of legitimacy of welfare states based on homogeneous provision of services for more different populations whose labour market position and individual demands have become more heterogeneous; and institutional pressure from European institutions to shift policy responsibilities towards local administrations (Brenner 2004; Ferrera, 2005b, Moulaert et al., 1988).

The localisation of welfare systems is sustained by three main arguments: they are considered to be more effective, more participative (democratic) and more sustainable. The effectiveness argument is based on the postulate that in complex societies individual needs are met with higher accuracy by welfare policies which are tailored more closely to their specific context. The democratic argument relies upon the idea that localisation of policies will facilitate the activation and empowerment of citizens and will facilitate the activation and participation of non-governmental actors in decision-making, therefore opening the arena to civil society organisations and strengthening democracy. Lastly, the search for improved provision and sustainability of services at the local level is based on the need to contain increasing costs of the national welfare state by giving more narrowly defined duties to local governments in terms of financing and/or spending and by raising new resources for welfare needs from local economic actors and social groups.

In the past 20 years, many local government bodies have become stronger actors in planning, financing and implementing social policies.¹ The current configuration of many welfare systems (Esping-Andersen, 1990) can no longer be seen only in terms of the national system, but must also be seen as a mix of central and sub-national policies, where the term ‘sub-national’ stands for government bodies at a lower territorial level than the central government—i.e. counties, regions, municipalities, provinces, comunidades, etc.

This new focus on the local dimensions of welfare systems does not mean that welfare policies can be considered to be local products. In almost every country, national laws and institutions maintain an essential function in defining the frameworks and the resources for the main welfare services, such as pensions, health care and social assistance. What is changing is the specific configuration that takes place when national welfare frameworks are planned, financed and implemented in sub-national contexts, with their specific needs and resources.

In order to take into account the spatial dimension beyond simple description, we propose the concept of the local welfare system (LWS). Local welfare systems are not fixed and stable structures, but dynamic processes in which the specific local socioeconomic and cultural conditions give rise to: different arrangements of formal and informal actors, public or not, involved in designing and implementing welfare policies; and different profiles of people in need (see also Mingione and Oberti, 2003). LWS is not to be considered as a simple rescaling of welfare responsibilities to the local level, but as specific configurations of population needs and welfare providers and resources emerging at the local levels. Every element of these configurations looks deeply embedded in the specific feature of each local context and highly interdependent on the other elements, so that it becomes part of a local system. Although these configurations are produced at the local level, they are to be seen as open systems which heavily intersect with other systems at different territorial levels. Therefore, the concept of LWS can be framed as an intersection of both local and supralocal dynamics.

The article seeks to contribute to the debate on local welfare with a twofold aim

— to explore, through a selective review of the research streams focusing mainly on European experiences, whether and when local welfare is better able to match offer and demand for welfare services and in this way to foster social cohesion;

— to understand how the concept of local welfare is used in the different research streams. We claim that the spatial dimension in welfare policy research is too often neglected, and that even when considered it is conceived as spatial variation (deviation), as though it were an inconvenience. We propose that one way to give the spatial dimension its due importance is to use the concept of the local welfare system (LWS).

The article breaks down into five further sections. In the next, we introduce the terms of the connection between local welfare and social cohesion. In the third section, we deal with the research stream focusing on the rescaling process with emphasis on the new solidarity principles based on territory. In the fourth section, we look at how the issue of localisation of welfare systems is connected to the process of activation of citizens and deploy the different meanings of activation and the relationship with local welfare and social cohesion. In the fifth section, we deal with the literature focusing on participation and social cohesion. In the conclusion, we put forward the concept of the local welfare system as a useful tool for the analysis and understanding of the role of the local dimension in the changes currently underway.

2. Local Welfare and Social Cohesion

The local dimension of welfare is not new; it has always been present in the state-regulated welfare models of the Fordist age, although in that period local governments were considered to be mere transmission belts for policies that were centrally defined (Brenner, 2004). What is changing in many European countries is the structural transformation in the regulation of welfare policies induced by two different processes. On the one hand, the devolution of responsibility from the central government to local bodies—vertical subsidiarity—has largely shifted the responsibility to define and to enforce social rights to local bodies, formally or de facto. On the other hand, the pluralisation of actors involved in the provision of social services—horizontal subsidiarity—has multiplied the number and type of (central but mainly local) stakeholders. These two processes are interconnected and their parallel development has been defined as the ‘subsidiarisation of social policies’ (Kazepov, 2008; Moreno, 2003).

The shifting of welfare systems from central to local levels is a diversified and complex process, with possible positive consequences as to the efficacy and pertinence of social policies, but also possible negative implications in terms of a lack of control capacities on the part of local governments, territorial fragmentation and inequalities threatening a nation-wide social cohesion. As we will explain in the next section, the emergence of local welfare systems is closely linked to the rescaling process of the national welfare systems. If the latter proved unable to eliminate strong social inequalities and polarised social conflict from industrialised societies, they were nonetheless able to guarantee a kind of social cohesion, based on Fordist occupational structures and stable familiar models. With the emergence of local welfare systems, the main debate that scholars and policy-makers are facing is to understand if and to what extent this new configuration of the welfare system is able to build a new kind of social cohesion, in which people can maintain fundamental social rights and activate their own resources at the same time.

The scientific debate explicitly referring to local welfare policies and social cohesion—and social solidarity as one important dimension of social cohesion (Kearns and Forrest, 2000)—is not widely developed; it was only in the 1990s that it emerged, in relation to the decentralisation and territorialisation of welfare policies. International organisations (for example, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Bank) and in particular the European institutions—the European Commission and the Council of Europe—have played a major role in reviving and shaping this debate, making the explicit link between the following concepts: subsidiarisation and territorialisation; activation, employability, empowerment; social investment, social cohesion and local economic development. Current research literature regularly refers to these concepts, focusing in turn on specific combinations that foster or hinder social cohesion.

In the introduction to this Special Issue, the Guest Editors recall the relationship between welfare policies (and labour market policies) and social cohesion, via the efforts to keep social and economic inequalities and exclusion from access to resources or markets under control, and via a new understanding of citizenship as that responsible participation in public affairs which is possible only if people are full citizens enjoying equality of opportunity. In this article, we refer to these two perspectives on social cohesion: access to welfare resources (labour market, social services, etc.) and participation in welfare resources.² These perspectives lead us to identify the three main research streams currently existing in the debate on local welfare and social cohesion.

The first stream is about how the rescaling of the welfare state changes the framework of social solidarity (and redistribution) of both national and local communities. The other two research streams focus on the implications of this new framework in terms of the activation of recipients and the participation of civil society groups in local governance arenas. The distinction between these research streams must be understood as an heuristic tool (although many authors deal with all of them simultaneously).

3. The Rescaling of Welfare and its Principles of Solidarity

The relationship between the persistent role of national welfare states and the local arrangements (in terms of partnership and governance, in terms of financial and economic resources, degree of discretion, etc.) gives rise to an important stream of research which refers to the rescaling of welfare policies (for example, Ferrera, 2005a and 2005b, Moulaert et al., 1988; Moreno, 2003; Kazepov, 2008; Keating, 1998). Such scholars describe how some differences are emerging even in countries belonging to the same geopolitical area, or belonging to the same welfare system, in particular with regard to the relationship between centre and periphery. In these studies, the focus is on the political and institutional dimension of the welfare, which is in turn identified with local administrative boundaries (regions, counties, etc.).

Some authors point out that, when the rescaling process is not accompanied by common standards and financial resources provided from central states, local social policies are more dependent on the discretionary power of local administrations and on the capacity of advocacy of civil society actors. In this case, the greater autonomy at the local level leads to a weakening of the guarantees of a high level of social protection (Kazepov, 2010; Schram et al., 2008). Rauch (2008) mentions Denmark as an example where the high level of state regulation of local authorities’ social policies, even with a decentralised fiscal system, has enabled the maintenance of a universally high level of social protection. The regulatory capacity of the nation-state plays a crucial role in the building of social cohesion as well, by guaranteeing citizens’ rights independently of the local conditions in which a person is embedded.

Moreover, other contributions highlight how the rescaling process of welfare can foster the increasing of inequalities at the local and urban levels (Crouch et al., 2001; Preteceille, 2006). In this view, the retrenchment of resources available for welfare systems and the decentralisation of national welfare states connected with the rescaling process have implicitly promoted a form of neo-liberal trade-off between workfare and social rights (Peck and Theodore, 2001, Peck, 2011; Schram et al. 2008; Geddes and Benington, 2001). According to this view, in the neo-liberal context, local citizens mobilisations are weaker since they can no longer rely on their affiliation to national worker organisations, nor on a strong advocacy association to defend their social rights (Procacci, 2001; Castel, 1995). Another possible effect of this kind of decentralisation is the more private kind of relationship between citizens and service providers which is implied in the neo-liberal instruments to govern public service (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2005; Freedland, 2001).

Other authors (Powell and Boyne, 2001; Ranci, 2005) are less critical and insist on the possible innovative implications of the rescaling process. According to this point of view, the lack of resources from the state can foster the capacity of local administrations to search for new local resources to be activated in the provision of welfare services, such as private firms or user associations. Within this research stream, a special focus is on how the shifting of welfare systems towards the local level and towards the European level (Guillèn and Palier, 2004; Ferrera, 2005b) is reshaping the solidarity principles on which the welfare state is based. As Massimo Paci stated (2008b), the growing role of both European policies and local contexts in the welfare systems is changing the normative base upon which many European countries have developed their welfare systems: from solidarity based mostly on working conditions to solidarity based mostly on the local context in which people live and on their capacity of activation. Solidarity, in this new normative framework, is no longer related to the work dimension but to citizenship itself and to the activation of civil society. The Supiot report (1999, 2001) was already oriented in the direction of developing a solidarity based no longer on the job, but anchored to citizens and to workers who are experiencing several jobs in the course of their working life and are involved in forms of life-long learning.

This solidarity principle entails a redistribution of chances and opportunities among groups and places (Kearns and Forrest, 2000) aiming at producing a social cohesion, as Streeck argues

not through equal outcomes, but through equal opportunity; … emphasizing individual effort and collective investment in competitiveness at least as much as social entitlements to minimal levels of reward or consumption (Streeck, 1999, p. 11).

Solidarity, in this view, is based not only on redistributing goods and opportunities among socioeconomic classes or occupational positions, but also on fostering citizens’ capabilities to mobilise their resources and to participate actively in policy-making. This kind of solidarity can be considered more active and reflexive (Donzelot, 2006; Beck, 2000) than the traditional solidarity based only on work.

4. Local Welfare and Activation Policies

One of the main strategies to reduce welfare costs and improve financial control (Pierson, 1994) over the national welfare state has been to promote the activation of citizens in building their own social condition. Starting in the 1980s, activation features became more and more systematic with particular reference to unemployment and social assistance.³ This strategy found its justification in the attempt not only to reduce welfare costs, but also to change the position of service recipients from a passive (in the old standardised welfare systems) to a more active role. In this framework, activation as well as empowerment of individuals and communities and/or local contexts increasingly became key words in welfare policies.

According to some authors, this implied a major paradigm shift, ‘reshaping’ the welfare state from socialisation of risks and collective coverage to individual responsibility and protection (Serrano Pascual and Magnusson, 2007). However, forms and meanings of activation vary considerably and express very different, even opposite, versions of social citizenship (Barbier, 2001). Indeed, activation can be referred to workfare strategies in their strictest version (Peck 2001, p. 10), yet it can also be referred to the capabilities approach (Sen, 1992) in its extended version⁴ (Bonvin and Farvaque, 2007; Borghi and van Berkel, 2007; Dean et al., 2005; Nussbaum, 2000; Salais, 2004), which implies a

capability for voice, i.e. the ability to express one’s opinions and thoughts and to make them count in the course of public discussion for all actors (Bonvin and Farvaque, 2005, p. 7).

Within this last framework, other authors consider that a new shift of paradigm occurred in the mid 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium with the concept of welfare policies as social investment (Giddens, 1998; Streeck, 1999; Supiot, 2001; Esping-Andersen, 2003; Jenson and Saint-Martin, 2006; Paci, 2006).

These meanings of activation can be considered the two extremes of a continuum where hybrid situations co-exist, as activation policies are ambiguous by nature, tending to combine some kind of investment in individuals (and communities) in terms of social and human capital and coercive features (incentives and sanctions) (Bonoli, 2010).

What these two approaches share is the central role of the local dimension. We will not discuss these studies in detail, nor assess the activation policies in the two approaches, although we point out some issues emerging from both schools of thought and their respective use of the local welfare concept.

4.1 Welfare to Work Policies

Not surprisingly, the bulk of the literature dealing with local welfare to work policies in their strict version makes no explicit reference to social cohesion. Social cohesion is considered a by-product, resulting from: access of the ‘excluded’ to the local labour market who in this way become active citizens; and the reduction of welfare recipients. As the Guest Editors of this Special Issue mention, these strategies are part of a liberal approach that puts emphasis first on individuals and on social cohesion resulting from the aggregation of ‘positive’ individual situations in the market sphere. Research studies carried out mainly in the Anglo-Saxon context report the positive impact of the local dimension both in terms of meeting welfare recipients’ needs and in terms of building local partnerships and innovative practices. The same studies point out, however, that these positive impacts cannot be taken for granted, focusing particularly on the importance of two significant local factors: the configuration of the local labour market; and, the role of the local welfare (state).

When the local labour market is dynamic and employment opportunities are high, local welfare to work policies turn out to be more effective in ensuring access to employment, in matching the welfare recipients’ needs and in reducing case loads (for example, de Verteuil et al., 2003; Bloom et al., 2003; Ashworth et al., 2005). With a slogan, we could say that “the ones who start from better conditions, also have better performances”.

Nevertheless, two questions arise. First, with respect to the quality of jobs (see Pratschke and Morlicchio, this issue), studies report that they are precarious and very poorly paid; people are receiving wages insufficient to raise their families above basic income levels (Nicaise, 2002; Finn, 2000). It seems to us that this result also questions the meaning of social cohesion in these dynamic local contexts, raising the question of social cohesion for whom? For the ones who are getting a poor job, for the social workers who have to meet case-load reduction requirements, or for the taxpayers who do not want their money to be spent on social assistance? The question remains without answer as social cohesion is not an issue in this kind of literature.

Secondly, the risk is quite evident in this situation of increasing territorial inequalities, favouring the already-rich localities and further impoverishing the others in a perverse spiral. This is (one of) the reason(s) why the redistribution of (economic) resources from rich regions to poor ones is considered a longstanding policy and why localisation of welfare policies is far from being problem-free and should be implemented carefully and only under certain conditions.

The other element that makes a difference in answering welfare recipients’ needs is the local welfare (state) organisation and its local political ideology (Schram et al., 2008). The street-level bureaucracy literature (Lipsky, 1980, 1984) as well as the shadow state literature (Wolch, 1990; Trudeau, 2008) has been used to explain the differences in the local welfare state and its organisation (de Verteuil et al., 2003). In both, case studies focus on the institutional level, on how private, voluntary and public providers act in respect to welfare recipients and in both cases the literature emphasises the retrenchment of the public sector. The question overlaps with the understanding of the local welfare concept. Local welfare is employed to mean the local welfare state, with its organisation and relations. Even when relations between local public providers and other local actors are considered, the dynamic aspect and the analysis of how the local socioeconomic and cultural conditions contribute to the different institutional arrangements are often neglected.

Taking up the distinction between decentralisation and the territorialisation of welfare policies (Bifulco et al., 2008), where the former stresses the role and structure of political administrative power (Ferrera, 2005b), while the latter stresses the places and contexts in which policies come to life and considers them as resources and constraints of public action, it seems to us that this literature mainly looks at decentralisation, disregarding the territories and their unique characteristics.

4.2 Welfare Policies as Social Investment

Much more attention to the territory has been paid by studies dealing with social policies as active welfare state (Giddens, 1998; Paci, 2005b); and social policies as social investment (Jenson, 2009a). These make explicit reference to the concept of social cohesion and, in several cases, it is explicitly mentioned as a policy aim (Paci, 2008a; Jenson and Saint-Martin, 2006; McKeen, 2006; Mahon, 2007; OECD, 2001). Social cohesion results from access to the labour market—sharing the principle to make work pay—but also to all (local) welfare services (Jenson, 2009a; Esping-Andersen, 2003). Access, however, is not enough. Social cohesion also results from the participation of the local community (the neighbourhood, the district, the city) in the provision of welfare services and the participation of individuals in the local community, for instance, by joining formal or informal local social networks and associations. From here, one may move easily to the large literature on local social capital in its various meanings (see Kearns and Forrest, 2001; Andreotti, 2009).

In this approach, active welfare policies can be deployed at three levels: individual, institutional and territorial. At the individual level, they emphasise activation and empowerment of the individual through education, training, participation in society and employment (Bonoli, 2009; Jenson, 2009a); at the institutional level, they emphasise the need to take into account all institutional actors (profit, voluntary, public, etc.), but they acknowledge a major role for the public sector, which is meant to ensure access to equitable welfare services (child care, for example) as well as income transfers (Mahon, 2005, 2007; McKeen, 2006). Finally, at the local level, they emphasise the territory and the community as the social space where resources and constraints can be mobilised. Within this framework, activation is not only related to social assistance recipients, but refers also to the elderly, the disabled (and all other categories considered vulnerable), as well as to local work/family policies and local child care policies.⁵

The concept of local welfare within this stream is used in a variety of ways. Some authors use the concept of local welfare mix (Jenson, 2003; Laville, 2003; Evers and Laville, 2004) to mean the relationship between the public sector, the market economy and the civil society designed to ease the difficult transition from the welfare state to the ‘active welfare society’. These studies often deal with the institutional networks and partnerships built at the local level (municipal, district or even neighbourhood level). It is in fact at the local level that innovative experiences of welfare provisions based on different forms of not-for-profit organisations (co-operatives, associations, voluntary groups, etc.) originate and contribute to servicing the local population (see Evers and Laville, 2004).

Once again, it is not our aim to review this literature, nor to assess the local experiments and the case studies. What is interesting to us is the fact that the territorialisation of welfare policies makes innovative and ad hoc solutions possible, but not ‘at a zero cost’. A first shared result of these studies is that active policies targeting individuals and aiming at increasing substantive freedoms and autonomy are expensive, as they must initiate a process encompassing many local actors and many resources in the territory which require economic as well as social investment. A second shared result, deriving from the previous one, is that the territorialisation of welfare policies cannot be done for the purpose of financial savings.

Local welfare arrangements prove to be effective and innovative in fostering social cohesion (access to resources and participation), although not in all cases and only under certain conditions. What still needs to be investigated is precisely what these conditions are, and how it is possible to foster them via political initiatives. Up to now, at least four conditions appear to be particularly relevant for the success of local welfare policies as social investment: the role of local public actors in promoting and co-ordinating forms of partnership among the different actors in the territory; a clear division of financial responsibilities among the different territorial levels; the access on behalf of local governments to stable complementary national funding in order to undertake innovative and effective policies; and access to equal rights on behalf of citizens, where these rights are clearly set by the national regulatory framework.

National welfare systems do indeed maintain an essential function in defining the frameworks within which local contexts operate and these frameworks continue to structure paths and perceptions of policies at the local level, as we have seen in the second research stream.

5. Local Welfare and Governance Arenas

Within the framework of a more active welfare system, some authors put forward the idea that associations and other civil society actors rooted at the local level, such as third-sector organisations and advocacy groups, can play the role of collective agency, much as national collective actors such as trade unions did during the objective solidarity period (Paci, 2008a). The mobilisation of civil society actors has been strongly fostered in welfare policies by the European Union through the open method of co-ordination and by many European member-states through the inclusion of civil society actors in the local planning of welfare provisions. The active participation of citizens in the deliberative process of local welfare is understood as a form of empowerment which fosters social cohesion. However, the involvement of civil society actors in governance arenas is a problematic issue which many scholars have focused on in recent years (Newman, 2001; MacCallum et al., 2009). The academic debate about this issue has become a relatively autonomous stream of research.⁶

Three critical elements have emerged in this debate: the lack of universalism and inclusivity; the definition of private actor mandates; and the neo-liberal platform on which these participative instruments are constructed.

A first problematic issue concerns the universalism and degree of inclusivity of governance arenas. Fraser (1997) shows how people’s capacity to participate in decisions is often unequally distributed, with the consequent risk of giving an advantage to those with already higher levels of agency and voice. Some research on governance (Fung and Wright, 2003; Trigilia, 2005) highlights how these arenas, in most cases, lack regulatory and participative models that provide all qualified actors the opportunity to participate and limit the decisions to be discussed and taken to those concerned with real and widespread needs. In most cases, there is a high risk of transforming governance arenas into exclusive policy communities. Other research shows the lack of transparency in decision-making responsibilities (Bifulco and Centemeri, 2008) and in mechanisms through which citizen groups’ opinions can be taken into account (Lowndes et al., 2001). A second problematic issue concerning governance has to do with the definition of private actors’ mandates. Barnes (1999) describes some self-representation problems that emerge when citizen associations need to define their mandate. For example, they may choose to introduce themselves as consumer groups based on some given interests—i.e. as citizen groups that ask for their rights to be acknowledged—although they may also be in charge of providing social services such as kindergartens or elderly care services and could thus justifiably introduce themselves as social providers. In many cases, public subjects, civil society subjects and, sometimes, for-profit organisations are tightly intertwined. Such interlacing can cause three problems. The first problem concerns the accountability of private actors who provide public services. Secondly, civil society associations can often play a double role: they are economic actors, as providers, and political actors, as citizens’ advocacy players. The overlapping of these two roles brings about a potential conflict of interest in their mandate. Thirdly, there is a legitimacy problem connected with the representation of private and civil society actors in governance arenas.

A much more explicit critique concerning governance and local participation is provided by authors such as Geddes and Benington (2001), Newman (2001) and Davies (2004). These authors highlight how the more common local governance models have been tailored in the frame of the neo-liberal platform, which requires the presence of market and capital actors in the policy-making process. Their research on local governance cases, mainly on urban regeneration programmes, shows that the need for a consensus among business actors with regard to these programmes tends to weaken the ability of local governments to take the voice of citizens into account in the governance process (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Donzelot, 2005). Under this perspective, local welfare policies may become less democratically responsive in relation to citizens’ needs, instead of having improved their ability to address such needs (Geddes, 2006; Baccaro, 2004; Papadopoulos and Warin, 2007).

5.1 The Local Welfare Systems

In the majority of the literature under review, the concept of local welfare remains vague and assumes different meaning according to the different authors as it stands, in turn, for the local welfare state, the local welfare mix or local social policies. The term ‘local’ is often used to refer to specific context-based research and specific case studies. We claim that all these concepts entail the local dimension, but they do not consider the space and the territory central in the analysis. The analytical concept of LWS may contribute to tackle this difficulty.

The LWS is not to be confused either with the local welfare state, which is only one aspect of the LWS (the public one), or with the local welfare mix which only refers to the different local actors providing welfare resources. The understanding of a LWS must start from its socioeconomic and cultural conditions and from the social structures in which it is embedded. Each local context has its own distinctive cultural, economic and social resources contributing to the creation of a different mix of actors who in turn contribute to affect the resources. It is precisely this mix and interplay that must be examined in a dynamic perspective. The primary challenge that this understanding faces is the need to go beyond the descriptive information of local diversity and to identify interpretative parameters that enable the comparison and evaluation of different contexts.

The municipal territory or the metropolitan area appears to be the most suitable proxy for this purpose. Every city, even within the same regional context, has in fact its own specific history, in which specific features have emerged in terms of socioeconomic organisation (the prevalence of a given sector, occupational and unemployment rates in particular of women and youths, the informal sector, etc.), socio-demographic structure (structure of the population by age, foreign presence and types of foreign presence, etc.), organisation of the ‘civil society’ and of political/institutional traditions that contribute towards the shaping of different LWS and of the ‘vision’ that they express in welfare policies.

Within this framework, it is important to look at how the public good is conceived and institutionalised (for example, how it is provided through welfare resources and how it is legitimised) in the different contexts. To understand this question, we stress the idea that it is important to look, on the one hand, at the population and its specific needs in the local context and, on the other hand, at the institutional provisions—i.e. the set of different formal and informal welfare providers and provisions in the local context, and at their dynamic development. The analysis of needs and their growing differentiation is based especially on the occupational, demographic, housing and socio-territorial factors. The analysis of these factors produces information about the various population groups and their demand for resources and services, while also giving a sense of the degree of the social context’s homogeneity and heterogeneity. For instance, it is important to understand, within one territory, if there are more young or elderly people, which kind of migrants (very young or adult, female or male) and which kind of ethnic minorities and how they are distributed within the territory: all these factors affect their demands for social protection and their possibility of access to and use of welfare resources.

The analysis of the institutional provision focuses primarily on two aspects: the characteristics of the local providers—for example, private for profit, third-sector and public actors, as well as the different partnerships and their forms; and, the capacity of public actors to promote and co-ordinate forms of co-operation and participation/empowerment of citizens. These aspects recall the governance narrative and its relationship with government.

6. Conclusions

Within the current trends of change, local welfare provision is becoming increasingly important in meeting the heterogeneous needs of a diversified and mobile population. The present crisis and the consequent (further) cuts in public expenditure are creating difficulties and hard times for national and local governments in order to increase or even to maintain welfare services. Within this framework, various kinds of local welfare resources have to be mobilised and innovative experiments have to be put in place to meet the needs of the population. The real challenge for all local welfare systems is in fact to provide welfare services (in particular, of care) without falling back to refamiliarisation practices (Esping-Andersen, 1990) that could not be sustained by increasing vulnerable families (Bambra, 2007; Leitner, 2003).

As a way of concluding we wish to come back to how the local dimension within the present trends of change is connected to the national and supranational levels (Lidstroem, 2007; Keating, 2009; Hooghe and Marks, 2001; McEwen and Moreno, 2004; Kazepov, 2010; Cheema and Rondinelli, 2007).

The empirical evidence stresses that innovative experiences are more likely to be planned and implemented at the local level. At a local scale, the territory with its resources and limits can indeed respond better to the local population’s needs. Yet important evidence exists on the risk of territorial inequalities and fragmentation in ensuring access to and participation in welfare provisions and services (of good quality) to citizens within countries (and across countries) with different outcomes in terms of social cohesion (Purcell, 2006; Schram et al., 2008; Rodriguez Pose and Ezcurra, 2010). Rich regions can foster local social cohesion by providing more resources and better access to welfare provisions. This can create tensions with other regions and may also threaten national social cohesion. The same line of reasoning can be true at the European level, with an increasing divide between rich and poor regions. Two questions emerge as crucial from these findings.

The first is the need for further investigation on the different local and national conditions that can produce territorial inequalities and fragmentation or, conversely, that can foster social cohesion and thus access and participation in welfare provisions (of good quality) at a local scale. No automatic relation exists between the increasing importance of the local level in the definition and implementation of welfare policies and the territorial inequalities. Some evidence already exists about local development and urban renewal policies (MacCallum et al., 2009; Keil and Mahon, 2009), much less about local social policies. One key finding in this respect is the importance of the local public sector (local welfare state) in promoting, co-ordinating and activating the different welfare providers and provisions: where the public sector is able to activate and co-ordinate the different resources and providers of the territory, policies are more likely to have successful outcomes.

The second question is the role of the central state. As seen in the literature under review, all findings stress that the national level still matters in framing and regulating local levels, in all policy fields and in particular with regard to welfare policies (Kazepov, 2010). The role of the state emerges as crucial in keeping territorial inequalities under control through a common regulatory framework (for instance, the certainty of social assistance programmes such as minimum income) and the stable funding of local authorities. Moreover, for the European member-states, an increasing role is played by the European Union, which can contribute to limiting the impact of the regional divide (for instance through the Social Funds or political pressure on the national central governments) (Ferrera, 2005b). The question overlaps with the principles of territorial solidarity underlying the European social model also discussed in the literature and in need of further investigation and reflection.

Footnotes

Notes

Funding Statement

This research was supported by the European Commission, 7th Framework Programme grant SOCIAL POLIS ‘Social Platform on Cities and Social Cohesion’ (grant number 217157).

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