Abstract
Introduction
With the Europe 2020 strategy and its headline target of lifting 20 million people out of poverty and social exclusion until 2020 (European Commission, 2010b), a number of policy initiatives in poverty reduction, social inclusion, education and employment have been adopted at the European and the Member States’ national levels. The European Social Survey shows that preventing poverty and reducing inequality through the welfare state has high priority among European populations (van Oorschot et al., 2012). Thus, there seems to be a strong general support for political initiatives that combat social inequality and exclusion. This special issue is aimed at reflecting on policy achievements and the challenges ahead and take stock of our understanding of the processes and factors underlying social exclusion and poverty across Europe.
Social exclusion is a term used to describe new forms of inequality (Atkinson and Davoudi, 2000; Copeland and Daly, 2012; Madanipour et al., 2003), from a multi-dimensional perspective, transgressing sectors and spheres of life. It relates to different spheres of integration: labour market participation is an important cornerstone of social inclusion or exclusion; access to welfare state entitlements and adequate housing; or the right for political participation are others. Place plays an important role here, too, in terms of place-specific patterns and integrated strategies (Bentley and Pugalis, 2014).
Social exclusion has a spatial dimension (Murie and Musterd, 2004: 1442), visible in distinctive patterns of spatial segregation, in small-scale concentration of urban disadvantage, or in the rural problems of remoteness and accessibility. The drivers for these patterns differ across European countries and regions (Arbaci, 2008; Marcińczaka et al., 2015; Musterd, 2005; Tasan-Kok et al., 2013: 22). This was an underlying rationale for the research project, upon which papers for this special issue are based. Undertaken by a European consortium of researchers, the TiPSE (Territorial Dimension of Poverty and Social Exclusion in Europe) project, which was funded by the ESPON 2013 programme, 1 aimed at extending and deepening the conceptual understanding and knowledge of the territorial patterns of poverty and social exclusion across Europe (Copus, 2014).
Among researchers and policy makers, there is growing concern that the social and economic developments of the recent years may have contributed to increasing, rather than reducing spatial segregation and poverty concentration in Europe (European Commission, 2011: 22ff.). Social inequalities have intensified and a widening gap between social groups is noted in many European countries (Allmendinger and von den Driesch, 2014; European Commission, 2010a; Hoorens et al., 2013; National Equality Panel, 2010; OECD, 2008). Growing inequalities are spatially expressed in the more accentuated enclaves of economic affluence and of low resources (Atkinson and Flint, 2004; Watt and Smets, 2014: 13ff). Social inequality, and its reproduction in space, undermines opportunities for social mobility independent of class, race and place where one lives. More and more, there are concerns about the consistency of spatial patterns of inequality, about inter-generational transmission of disadvantage in specific places, about persistent educational divisions, or neighbourhood context effects.
The ‘filters’ for preventing a single risk (such as losing a job, getting divorced, etc.) from triggering a chain reaction, leading to social exclusion, are associated with, among other factors, welfare system regulations, community or social network relations, and the housing market. These mechanisms for promoting social cohesion, however, have become weaker in most European states over the last decades. Across the European Union (EU), there has been a shift of emphasis from the state’s responsibility for providing social support towards individual responsibility, via paid work, for playing an active role in achieving societal inclusion. Recent years have also seen the impact of cost-containment, most notably in those countries hit hardest by the economic and financial crisis. Severe cutbacks of public spending within different sectors, e.g. social protection schemes and educational programmes, have affected the most vulnerable groups, such as low qualified, immigrants and young people, but also middle class households or well qualified young people. Specifically in countries where welfare support relies to a larger extent on family resources, the effects of the crisis have created heavy strains.
The political EU2020 headline target for poverty reduction and social inclusion seems more challenging than ever, as suggested by monitoring reports, for different reasons, ranging from the consequences of the recent economic crisis to a differing commitment of policy actors at different levels. National governments still pay too little attention to the social, as compared to the economic, dimension of the EU2020 (Frazer and Marlier, 2014; Talbot et al., 2014). Some of the main mechanisms of the European Commission, such as the Social Investment Package, are not fully operative, and their effectiveness is yet to be evaluated. It also remains to be seen as to how far place-based cohesion policies and integrated actions (such as the Community-Led Local Development) can improve the lives of the socially excluded in specific places. Place-based policies seem specifically relevant for areas in which multiple processes – lack of or neglected infrastructure, migration, stigmatisation and lack of political voice – overlap, for example, in the case of Roma in rural South-Eastern Europe.
Social exclusion, for its multi-dimensional character, is a process that is difficult to grasp, measure or monitor. While social exclusion figures prominently in policy documents at local and higher policy levels, local definitions of social exclusion and its measurement are narrowed down to what is measurable by available statistics. Most often, this is about employment and income, but little data exists on social or political participation. However, single indicators can only reflect a part of the story, as vulnerability to social exclusion results from the cumulative overlapping of various dimensions. Data reflecting social, political and environmental issues need to be linked with labour market and income information, and official statistical data need to be complemented with surveys and the subjective perception of exclusion (Milbourne, 2014; Rojas, 2004). While it is statistically difficult to capture the processes which are linked to social exclusion, more and more efforts are made to address these limitations. This is exemplified in the work on indicators of multiple deprivation in the UK, the Hungarian Most Disadvantaged Micro-Regions programme, or indicators for life situations and well-being in the Netherlands. In order to raise awareness for the challenges linked to social exclusion, and the need for political counter-action, it is necessary to provide a clearer picture of the processes of exclusion, based on both quantitative and qualitative data and visualisation.
While defining and measuring poverty is mainly based on income and consumption, conceptualising and measuring social exclusion is less well established in research. The TiPSE project defined four domains of social exclusion, in which to identify indicators for social exclusion analysis and mapping: (1) Earning a living, (2) Access to basic services, (3) Social environment and (4) Political participation. One of the main goals of the research project was to provide datasets on regional trends and patterns of poverty and social exclusion across Europe. Mapping social exclusion at a regional level has been a very challenging task, for lack of data as well as methodological problems. Whereas comparable data across European regions was available for the ‘Earning a living’ domain, it was difficult or impossible to find adequate datasets for the other domains. Furthermore, lack of harmonisation often hindered comparisons between Member States, which could not be resolved during the lifetime of the project. Although the project was able to create a unique database and provide some insights into the way forward for measuring and monitoring poverty and social exclusion across Europe, significant challenges remain.
If trends and processes are monitored on regional (aggregated) level only, inner-regional disparities and high concentrations of poverty and social exclusion at a micro-scale level may get masked. A mixed-methods approach thus was applied, and case study research in specific localities supported European-wide data analysis and explored, with a more qualitative and in-depth focus on the multiple factors underlying processes of poverty and social exclusion.
The articles
Contributions to this special issue address the problems and processes of poverty and social exclusion, investigating the territorial patterns of poverty and social exclusion at various levels, from macro-regions to neighbourhood case studies.
Ali Madanipour, Mark Shucksmith and Hilary Talbot provide an overview on the concepts of poverty and social exclusion within an EU context. They argue that poverty and social exclusion are closely related, but nevertheless distinct phenomena. A major issue for research and policy is related to assessing and measuring the processes related to both. Specifically social exclusion, as a multi-dimensional and complex process, is a challenging concept to measure, and more research is needed on analysing social exclusion across Europe. The authors see a tendency in the policy discourse to narrow down measurement to economic indicators, which is not only linked to the gap in appropriate indicators and measurement, but also in line with the European policy discourses that focus on economic growth as a response to complex societal challenges. Such a narrowing down to economic concerns and employment, however, could undermine the European Commissions’ ability to deal with the multi-dimensional processes underlying both poverty and social exclusion. Analysis, therefore, needs to incorporate cultural and social processes, along the economic ones, while paying more attention to the inherent territoriality of poverty and social exclusion.
Andrew Copus, Patricia Melo, Stefan Kaup, Gergely Tagai and Panagiotis Artelaris show the variation of regional (NUTS-3) At-risk-of-poverty rates across 20 European countries. The at-risk-of-poverty rate, a headline indicator of the EU2020, is defined as the percentage of persons in households whose equivalised disposable income is less than 60% of the national median. This indicator is now widely used as a proxy to measure economic poverty but is not easy to interpret, as it shows both the level and distribution of income. On the basis of their unique database, the authors show a strong association between (un)employment rates and poverty rates as a general trend across Europe, and interestingly, varying relationships in different parts of Europe, linked to the characteristics of different welfare regimes. Unfortunately, a similar paper on social exclusion trends and patterns across Europe is not available for this special issue. For the moment, the database for mapping social exclusion is too thin and issues of data availability and harmonisation need to be solved first, before an analysis of patterns and trends across Europe becomes possible.
Sabine Weck and Isabel Ramos Lobato use a cross-comparative perspective to analyse factors influencing social exclusion at the local level and the continuities and discontinuities between the local and the national level. These factors, that are widely seen to influence local social exclusion processes, are economic and labour market developments, welfare regime types and the nature of the local state, and characteristics of individuals and their immediate living environment. The paper is based on findings from 10 case studies across Europe, carried out by research partners in urban and rural contexts. The findings illustrate how social exclusion takes on particular forms at the local level, and the lines of connection and disconnection between locally specific patterns and general trends and factors influencing the risk of social exclusion. Finally, the authors draw attention to the perpetuation of inter-regional disparities, within a political framework which favours the growth regions, and against the background of austerity measures, which have additional influence over and above the ‘old’ patterns of intra- and interregional territorial polarisation in Europe.
Katalin Kovacs discusses the social exclusion of Roma population in two adjacent rural regions of Hungary and Slovakia, focussing specifically on the interrelation between residential and educational segregation, and how their overlap intensifies social exclusion. The Roma population is one of the most underprivileged ethnic minority groups in East Central Europe, experiencing severe forms of deprivation and marginalisation. The author shows the similarities in the two regions, where the non-Roma population’s departure to urban areas and the segregating policies of the education system overlap, trapping the Roma children in segregated neighbourhoods and schools, widening the educational gap with the other children, and exacerbating the adult Roma population’s problems of social exclusion.
Thomas Maloutas and Isabel Ramos Lobato compare the rationales underlying the reproduction of educational (dis)advantage within two quite different educational and urban segregation schemes, in Athens/Greece and Dortmund/Germany. Taking two different, with respect to their timing, but equally crucial moments of transition in the educational career of pupils, the authors analyse the reproduction of social inequality and the interaction between urban segregation patterns, educational systems and middle-class educational strategies in it. The analysis shows a clear link between socio-economic background and educational outcomes – against the background of clearly different residential segregation patterns and educational systems in Athens and Dortmund.
George Kandylis argues for paying attention to both unintended/passive and intended/active forms of exclusion and their consequences in terms of spatial patterns of exclusion. Kandylis analyses the spatiality of immigrants’ exclusion in Athens from these two perspectives, contrasting the emergent forms of residential segregation, linked primarily to the local housing and labour market system, with ‘planned’ or state-related segregation through policing, clearance and, ultimately, the containment of undocumented immigrants in detention centres. In the case of Athens, micro-scale data shows a pattern of overall low levels of residential segregation and the close proximity of different socio-economic groups. Nevertheless, the perceived concentration of immigrants and their visibility in central parts of the city seem to have legitimized policies of intended spatial isolation, including detention facilities, which the new government intends to close down.
Mitchell Reardon and Christian Dymén focus on the institutional efforts at the local level to mitigate social exclusion. Municipal institutions, in their way of perceiving the challenges and their actions, have at times been part of social exclusion processes. Taking the case of Botkyrka, a municipality in Stockholm region, as a good example, the authors argue for a much needed change in perspective: from seeing diversity as a problem to its appreciation; from stigmatisation of the poor and excluded to the processes and institutions that contribute to social exclusion; from often one-sided requests for integration to an intercultural municipal strategy for the interaction between people from different origins.
The focus of the concluding article by Hilary Talbot, Mark Shucksmith and Ali Madanipour is to point to the policy implications of the TiPSE research, related to conceptualising poverty and social exclusion, issues of scale, and the geographies of poverty and social exclusion. The authors specifically point to the need for a broad conceptualisation of the various facets of poverty and social exclusion (in the domains At Risk of Poverty Rate, Earning a living, Access to Basic Services, Social Environment, Political Participation), the need for a multi-scale analysis, and better attention in the policy process to the differing geographies of poverty and social exclusion.