Katharina Zimmermann

Stakeholder participation and policy integration in local social and employment policies: Germany and Italy compared

The majority of the European countries experienced a turn towards activation policies during the last decades. The aim of increasing employment rates of groups formerly excluded from the labour market has required closer links with training, family or social policies with employment policy. As a result of this, we can observe modifications also in regard to policy governance, particularly emphasizing the role of the local level in implementing integrated activation policies. This article aims at testing the hypothesis of whether higher levels of stakeholder participation in the policy process lead to greater policy integration. In an explorative manner, the research hypothesis will be tested with reference to two very different cases of local activation policy. Driving factors for the differential impact of participation on policy integration will be identified through the analysis of two in-depth case studies. A qualitative process-tracing method is used in order to conduct our analysis.

Local Responses to the European Social Fund: A Cross-City Comparison of Usage and Change

Governance in the European Union has become increasingly complex and multi-facetted in the last decades. The article argues that the ESF (European Social Fund) is a crucial example in this regard since it combines financial incentives, procedural requirements and programmatic conditions. In order to analyse local responses to this complex governance tool, the article deploys analytical tools from the Europeanization literature and builds on in-depth case knowledge from 18 cities in six European countries. A QCA (Qualitative Comparative Analysis) combined with case discussions reveals three different types of responses to the ESF. In ‘transformer-cases’, both usage of the ESF and change brought by it can be observed. In ‘cream-skimmer-cases’, only usage but no change was measured, and in ‘refusenik-cases’, neither usage nor change was detected. While usage of the ESF can be explained by individual motivation of local actors or the incentivizing dimension of the funds, change is apparently more complex.

Attitudes to Inequalities: Citizen Deliberation About the (Re-)Distribution of Income and Wealth in Four Welfare State Regimes

This chapter shows that most people are well aware of rising inequality, but that responses differ between countries and are loosely related to regime type and recent policy changes. Slovenia and Denmark have roughly the same degree of (low) inequality, but only in Slovenia, a generally poorer country, do participants demand redistributive tax and minimum wage policies. The fact that a strong universalist welfare state exists in Denmark seems to help justify inequality and defuse concerns: inequalities are real but not as marked as elsewhere and in any case are likely to be legitimate. In the UK most people accept much larger income inequalities and regard them as for the most part justified by the effort they believe high earners put in. The gulf between the workshy and hard-working families is seen as much more important. In Germany there is a widespread view that inequalities are unfair, but simultaneous scepticism exists about the effectiveness of state interventions. In all four countries there is agreement that social investment programmes, particularly training, education and childcare, are the best way forward.

Labour Market Challenges and the Role of Social Investment

Labour market issues were a major topic of discussion in all countries, but different aspects attracted attention: in Germany the key issues were precarious work, poor job conditions at the bottom end and the balance between work and family life; in the UK the strong work-first ethos dominated discussion; issues surrounding flexicurity (the cost of active labour market support and the extent of security) emerged in Denmark; and in Slovenia unemployment and living standards were the main focus. Immigrants were seen in different ways—as providing younger workers to balance ageing populations in Norway and Denmark, as requiring skill training and integration in Germany and as unwelcome competitors for jobs in the UK.

Soziale Dienstleistungen für Arbeitslose

Abstract This article investigates the implementation of an integrated activation policy in Germany. The activation paradigm has been recently extended to target clients with multiple problems out of employment. In order to do so, an approach of activation is needed that integrates policy fields, policy actors and policy levels. We compare different forms of integration in three German cities and find that local factors really play a significant role.

Local worlds of coordinated activation policy

In Chapter 11 on local worlds of coordinated activation in Europe, Katharina Zimmermann, Vanesa Fuertes and Patrizia Aurich-Beerheide shed light on the role of the local level as a generic actor in the organization of activation. The authors apply a standardized fuzzy-set analysis to implementation patterns in all 18 local entities studied for the research underlying this book, focusing on the local coordination of policy areas, administrative levels and stakeholders relevant for activation. Zimmermann, Fuertes and Aurich-Beerheide find no explicitly local patterns of implementation in the area of activation policies that transcend the boundaries of nation states. However and instead, they find three country clusters that do not correspond with established welfare state or activation regime typologies: ‘coherent coordination’, ‘partial coordination’ and ‘stakeholder coordination’. This seems a highly interesting starting point for more research on the mechanisms shaping the coordination and implementation of activation in different policy and governance contexts.