Workshop Report "At the Nexus of Voluntary Action and Public Policies: Rethinking Care in Southeastern Europe (original) (raw)
The right to care: Entering outside in the southern European crisis of welfare
2019
In these notes, we share the questions and challenges around care and health that emerged in the research project Entrar Afuera (Entering Outside, 2016-2018), a multi-site and multi-format dialogue around critical practices of healing and caring in three sites in southern Europe, Trieste (Italy), Madrid (Spain) and Thessaloniki (Greece). As we will see, we focus this text in Trieste and the dialogue with Madrid. Driving us in this project was our common aspiration to reflect about the urban practices of care during and after the crisis that began in September of 2008. However, there was also a common ethic of emancipation in the institutional critique – the examination of how institutions were caring for people in that critical moment and toward a horizon of change – the imagination of how people could use and fashion institutions in order to care for each other.
The provision of public and personal social services in European countries
The Routledge Handbook of International Local Government, 2018
This chapter discusses the institutions (organizations and actors) involved in the delivery of public and personal social services. A historical and developmental approach is followed in which four phases are distinguished (Millward 2005, Wollmann 2014). The late 19th century ('pre welfare state') phase; in Western European (WE) countries, the advanced welfare state peaking in the 1970s. In Central Eastern European (CEE) countries, the centralised Socialist State that continued until the early 1990s; and this is contrasted with the New public management (NPM)-inspired and marketdriven 'liberalisation' of the 1980s onward. The most recent phase has developed since the mid 1990s The guiding question of the 'developmental' analysis is whether institutional convergence or divergence has prevailed during the respective phases .
The model of social protection in Southern Europe: Enduring characteristics?
Change, challenges and constraints faced by the model of social protection in Southern European countries are analysed. This paper carries out an overview on the “state-of-the-art” welfare transformation in Southern Europe. The main purpose is to identify thematic issues and to frame areas of observation and key issues for future research. Three main analytical dimensions are taken into consideration: socio-economic; politico-institutional and cultural-axiological. The evidence used in tables and figures is aimed at illustrating the description of the facts and processes under analysis. By discussing the nature of presentday Mediterranean welfare, the assessment of its enduring effects may be better discerned. Such a task is meant to facilitate comparisons on examining social policy-making in other EU systems and regimes. It is concluded that a major potential overhaul for the Southern European model relates to the transformation of the Mediterranean family, its most characteristic institution interpenetrating the provision of a wide range of welfare activities.
Administering social care in the European Union: moving towards one-stop shops?
Tribuna Juridica, 2018
Protection and inclusion have for long been some of the guiding principles of the European welfare states. The crisis of 2008 placed social investment high on the social policy agenda in the EU and specific policies that the new paradigm embraces have been in focus. Unfortunately, little attention is paid to administering policies. Creating one-stop shops, as a new way of easier and more efficient use of available resources for citizens, is perceived as the most suitable way for administration of specific policies. This paper is a contribution to this debate, looking at ways social policy is administered across the EU, from a double perspective. First, having social investment as the theoretical but also practical approach and second, looking at different welfare state regimes. This approach should point to major differences in social policy administration but also present which models perform the best. Most importantly, the paper aims to show how administering social care influences implementation of policy changes across the European Union.
The European Union policy framework for social services: agendas, regulations and discourses
Social Services Disrupted
This chapter aims at assessing the EU's emergent policy framework-the agendas, regulations and discourses-concerning social services within the larger field of social protection. As discussed in Chapter 1, social services stand out as a contested and changing policy area in discussions about the architecture of the welfare state. Some countries adhere to a liberal welfare model where public social service provision is considered a paternalistic market interference. In others of more conservative orientation, it is feared as a potential threat to the social fabric of the family and local community. And even in countries with traditions of comprehensive and service-intensive welfare provisions, current debates revolve around the most appropriate level of government responsibility, mostly favouring decentralised social services designed and delivered by local authorities. These deep-seated differences in views and traditions complicate any supra-national regulation, and indeed, the European Union (EU), encompassing representatives of several different welfare models, has taken a somewhat ambivalent stance on the role of social services in a more integrated Europe. This has been one of the reasons why, for half a century, social services were not explicitly included in the roadmap to an integrated European Union. The other main reason is that the European Economic Community was designed to create a level playing field to facilitate economic activity, and the social dimension was incorporated primarily to prevent unfair competition. Thus, although the European social charter signed in Turin by the member states of the Council of Europe on October 1961 established that 'everyone has the right to benefit from social welfare services' (Council of Europe, 1961, Article 14), the nearly contemporary Treaty of
Social Welfare and Democracy in Europe: What Role for the Private and Voluntary Sectors?
RECON Online Working Paper Series , 2010
This paper explores the role of the private and voluntary sectors in helping to fill gaps in public sector social welfare provision and considers the extent to which this augments or weakens the democratic process. While the public sector has tended to be the major provider in European social welfare systems, since the late 1980s there has been a notable trend towards increasing use of privately provided support and grey services as people (and governments) have sought solutions outside of the state welfare system. This shift has been fuelled by an increasing emphasis on measures that encourage efficiency, productivity and competitiveness as well as pressures on the sustainability of welfare systems which have been exacerbated by the recent global financial crisis. First, the authors discuss the emerging ‘disorganised welfare mix’ and the implications of restructuring welfare regimes according to quasi-market principles. It is asked whether these approaches resolve or exacerbate the ‘dilemmas’ of welfare provision, particularly in terms of wider democratic goals and social inclusion. Second, the authors examine empirical case studies from Britain, the US and New Zealand of the Private Finance Initiative, Asset-Based Community Development and the new contractualism to investigate how adoption of neoliberalising welfare strategies is reconstituting democracy in Europe and beyond. Third, the current state of welfare provision in Europe is mapped through a critical analysis of the European Social Model (EMS) and the Welfare Triangle. Finally, further examples from Europe are used to analyse the contradictions between the goals of social protection and regulation that underpin European social policy and the demands for increased flexibilisation and privatisation promoted by the European Single Market and the rulings of the European Court of Justice.
Historický časopis
The article is directed towards describing and analysing three thematic parts. The first is directed towards the social conditions in the modern European societies of around 1900, which stimulated the development of public care for the young. These conditions are classified as follows: the end of the first demographic transition, an economy of human resources motivated by utilitarian thinking, nationalist populationism and militarism. In the specific conditions of building Czechoslovakia, state propaganda emphasizing building the image of a democratic, tolerant and progressive republic must be added to these facts. The second part is devoted to the problematic fusion of the different traditions of care for the young in the Austrian and Hungarian parts of the Habsburg Monarchy. Analysis of the problems of unification focuses on three thematic parts: 1) differences in the legislation of the two parts of the state, 2) the institutional structure and its development, 3) traditions of civil charity. In spite of the transfer of the Czech organizational structure of District Youth Care and its centralized building based on ethnic principles into Slovakia and Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, strong elements of continuity with the prewar system remained. The third part deals with nationalism and ethnic factors in social care for the young. Precisely here, there was strong continuity with the 19th century, when national rivalry between the Czechs and Germans influenced the development of the institutions of social care. Special attention is devoted to the Roma and the application of the vague concept of the "Gypsy way of life" to care for the young.