Daniel Edmiston

Tackling Marginalisation through Social Innovation? Examining the EU Social Innovation Policy Agenda from a Capabilities Perspective

Abstract This paper demonstrates that the capabilities approach offers a number of conceptual and evaluative benefits for understanding social innovation and—in particular, its capacity to tackle marginalisation. Focusing on the substantive freedoms and achieved functionings of individuals introduces a multidimensional, plural appreciation of disadvantage, but also of the strategies to overcome it. In light of this, and the institutional embeddedness of marginalisation, effective social innovation capable of tackling marginalisation depends on (a) the participation of marginalised individuals in (b) a process that addresses the social structuration of their disadvantage. In spite of the high-level ideals endorsed by the European Union (EU), social innovation tends to be supported through EU policy instruments as a means towards the maintenance of prevailing institutions, networks and cognitive ends. This belies the transformative potential of social innovation emphasised in EU policy documentation and neglects the social structuration processes from which social needs and societal challenges arise. One strategy of displacing institutional dominance is to incorporate groups marginalised from multiple institutional and cognitive centres into the policy design and implementation process. This incorporates multiple value sets into the policy-making process to promote social innovation that is grounded in the doings and beings that all individuals have reason to value.

Social Impact Bonds: The Role of Private Capital in Outcome-Based Commissioning

Social impact bonds are payment by results contracts that leverage private social investment to cover the up-front expenditure associated with welfare services. The introduction of private principles and actors through outcome-based commissioning has received a great deal of attention in social policy research. However, there has been much less attention given to the introduction of private capital and its relation to more established forms of quasi-marketisation. This paper examines what effect private social investment has on outcome-based commissioning and whether the alternative forms of performance measurement and management, that social impact bonds bring to bear on service operations, demonstrate the capacity to engender: innovation in service delivery; improved social outcomes; future cost savings; and additionality. This paper draws on an in-depth study of four social impact bonds in the UK context, as the welfare regime at the vanguard of this policy development. The findings suggest that the introduction of private capital in outcome-based commissioning has had a number of unique and unintended effects on service providers, operations and outcomes. The paper concludes by considering whether social impact bonds represent a risk or an opportunity for public service reform both in the UK and further afield.

Welfare, Austerity and Social Citizenship in the UK

Viewed within their historical context, recent cuts to public social spending and increasingly governmental welfare reforms reflect and beget a shift in the praxis of social citizenship in the UK. This review article demonstrates how greater conceptual attention to the constitutive features of social citizenship can help clarify some of the claims made about its relation to austerity and welfare reform within the existing literature. Through schematic consideration of the emerging evidence, this article suggests that welfare austerity is undermining the ‘effectiveness’, ‘inalienability’ and ‘universality’ of social citizenship in the UK.

The Age of Austerity: Contesting the Ethical Basis and Financial Sustainability of Welfare Reform in Europe

This paper examines the policy of austerity in three European welfare regimes with differing levels of social spending and fiscal balance: Italy; Sweden; and the UK. In spite of significant material differences between the three countries, the paper begins by illustrating that there is ultimately convergence in their responses to the economic crisis. These welfare regimes have justified the terms of austerity by suggesting that economic and welfare reforms address questions of ‘need’, ‘fairness’ and ‘sustainability’. Contrary to dominant political and policy rationale, the paper demonstrates that austerity measures in each country fail to meet policy objectives given their own conceptions of social and distributive justice. The three welfare regimes lack cogent strategies to safeguard their financial sustainability and this results in a neo-liberal paradigm that compromises the ethical and internal coherence of austerity.

Introduction: Austerity, Welfare and Social Citizenship

Since the global financial crisis in 2008, an ‘austerity consensus’ has emerged across many advanced capitalist economies (Farnsworth and Irving, 2012 ). Despite differing institutional settings, there has been a notable degree of convergence on fiscal consolidation (Farnsworth and Irving, 2012 ; Taylor-Gooby, 2012 ). Alongside this, political administrations have repeatedly claimed that welfare profligacy and dependency are key causes of public sector debt and economic stagnation. On this basis, political leaders have cultivated a policy mandate to re-configure working-age welfare and constrain public social expenditure in this domain. Taken together, these reforms represent a ‘new, more constrained and qualitatively different deal for citizens’ (Dwyer and Wright, 2014 : 33). The central objective of this themed section is to explore the impact of these developments and their significance for the shifting character and operation of social citizenship in countries pursuing a similar strategy of ‘welfare austerity’ (MacLeavy, 2011 : 360).

‘How the Other Half Live’: Poor and Rich Citizenship in Austere Welfare Regimes

A growing body of research quantifies the recent impact of fiscal consolidation and public service reform in liberal welfare regimes. However, less is known about how this is affecting the common terms upon which citizenship status is granted and experienced. With this in mind, this article examines what bearing the political crafting of welfare austerity is having on the status, rights and identity of notionally equal citizens. To do so, this article draws on a qualitative study examining lived experiences of poor and rich citizenship in New Zealand and the UK. Despite policy programmes idiosyncratic to their institutional context, both countries exhibit a similarly bifurcated system of social citizenship that is serving to structure, rather than moderate, material and status inequalities in austere welfare regimes.

Social Innovation Policy in the European Union

In recent years, social innovation has become an increasingly prominent concept employed by political leaders and administrations across the world. In 2003, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) supported a range of initiatives and research to promote inclusive entrepreneurship and ‘improve social cohesion through the identification and dissemination of local innovations’. In 2009, President Barack Obama established the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation to support cross-sectoral, bottom-up solutions to social problems and challenges in the USA. In Europe, social innovation has proved to be equally conspicuous in pan-European strategies and domestic policies. Innovation has been of enduring interest and concern for European Union (EU) policy for many years (Borzaga and Bodini 2014), but since the late 1990s social innovation in particular has captured the political interest of supranational organisations and domestic actors (Pol and Ville 2009; Grisolia and Ferragina 2015). In the EU, social innovation has been posited as a solution to both old and new social risks at a time of heightened uncertainty and pressure on public administrations and finances (Bonoli 2005; OECD 2011; Sinclair and Baglioni 2014). It seems clear that this considerable interest in social innovation has been intimately linked to the Great Recession, structural unemployment and the social challenges arising as a result (European Commission 2014a). Indeed, a key feature of the Europe 2020 strategy was to facilitate and embed social innovation across Europe to ‘deliver the kind of inclusive and sustainable social market economy we all want to live in’ (BEPA 2010: 16).

Some Useful Sources

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