Alongside the ongoing renewal process of the Finnish welfare state, the role of the citizens is also revisited. So far the attention has mainly focused on how the responsibility for service provision is shared between the public sector and the service users, while the role of public services as a part of the democratic system has been more or less ignored. Based on the results from a 3-year participatory action research project called KAMPA, this article will discuss if the development of co-production in the context of public welfare services shows the way forward toward a new kind of society where democracy is an inseparable part of the structures and procedures of the service provision. The data gathered during the project (textual material, interviews, notes from meetings, and observation diaries) is analyzed using thematic analysis. The results show that while legislation and official policies strongly highlight the participation of citizens and service users there are still many obstacles to overcome at both the attitudinal and practical level. The development of coproduction and arenas of a new kind of democracy requires continuity in the attempts and recognition of the achievements, but it also has the potential to demonstrate the way in which a new more lively democratic society can come true in practice.
In Finland, the rural areas have been most affected by the developments threatening the survival of the welfare state as well as by conflicting efforts to save it. However, there are rural communities that have-as a response to the mainstream policy emphasizing economic efficiency and individual responsibility-developed innovative solutions to secure their welfare. Based on a case study focusing on two of such communities, these local welfare innovations are a result from a combination of external causes and local resources including the sense of community and a diverse enough community structure. The authors argue that in the context of welfare policy, the promotion of local welfare innovation calls for a comprehensive approach, which considers the broader viability dimension of the communities and works towards it in tight collaboration with various actors from different policy fields and societal sectors. K E Y W O R D S associations, government policy, clubs, committees, provision and effects of welfare programmes, regional economic activity: growth, development, and changes, social choice, welfare economics
The article discusses the issues of social services in rural areas from a theoretical view point of sustainability paradigms of social work. The ecological crisis existing beyond the ongoing global economic crisis is not separated from the increasing urbanization and weakening perspectives in rural areas. The paper is based on results from a participatory action research project in Finland, which aims at strengthening social service provision in rural areas through citizens' participation and community-orientation. The neoliberal politics of centralization, marketization and privatization are heavily transforming rural regions also in the Nordic welfare states right now. The debates in the rural citizens' forums could be concluded in three tasks of the project's further agenda: a renewed democratic governance of social services, a radical turn towards the involvement of and respect for service users, and practical steps towards citizens as coproducers, especially in the form of village cooperatives. The results encourage participatory approaches in order to create practicable models for social services not only in rural areas. Conceptualizing sustainability can be especially productive in the rural contexts where interdependency of different life areas is more evident.
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