Two Decades of Change in Europe: The Emergence of the Social Investment State

Abstract

Since the late 1970s, the developed welfare states of the European Union have been recasting the policy mix on which their systems of social protection were built. They have adopted a new policy orthodoxy that could be summarised as the 'social investment strategy'. Here we trace its origins and major developments. The shift is characterised by a move away from passive transfers and towards the maximalisation of employability and employment, but there are significant national distinctions and regime specific trajectories. We discuss some caveats, focusing on the question whether the new policy paradigm has been established at the expense of social policies that mitigate poverty and inequality.

The Welfare State and Antipoverty Policy in Rich Countries

“…The notion of 'social investment' has come to play a major part in debates about the role of social spending and the future of welfare states in the rich countries, particularly in Europe where the language of social investment has become embedded in European Union discourse since the adoption of the Lisbon Agenda in 2000. A number of important recent contributions have highlighted its potential as a new perspective on or paradigm for social policy in the context of the economic crisis and to the demand of the knowledge-based economy more broadly, as an alternative to neoliberal responses focusing on retrenchment in social spending, and as a key ingredient in responding to the macroeconomic/Euro crisis (see for example the contributions to Morel, Palier and Palme, 2011, Vandenbroucke, Hemerijck and Palier, 2011, and Hemerijck and Vandenbroucke, 2012 Others have sought to assess the extent to which recent directions in social policies and spending patterns could be characterised as moving towards a social investment strategy, and whether disappointing outcomes in terms of poverty can be seen as a failure of such a strategy (Cantillon, 2011;Vandenbroucke and Vleminckx, 2011;Van Kersbergen and Hemerijck, 2012). The EU is paying serious attention to this debate, as evidenced by the establishment by DG Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities of an expert group on Social Investment for Growth and Cohesion in autumn 2012 as input to a major initiative envisaged in the area of social policies.…”

Welfare Regimes and Education Regimes: Equality of Opportunity and Expenditure in the EU (and US)

“…However, education has a pivotal role in the social investment strategy (Lister, 2004;van Kersbergen and Hemerijck, 2012), and, as such, social and education policies are interdependent (Nikolai, 2011). At the EU level, they are part of one policy sphere (Allmendinger and Leibfried, 2003).…”

Restructuring of Welfare States. Quantitative and Qualitative Changes: the case of Spain / Reestructuración de los Estados del Bienestar. Cambios Cuantitativos y Cualitativos: el caso de España

“…The main assumption of the paradigm of social investment is that less emphasis should be placed on "social protection" and more on prevention and being proactive. In terms of the state's intervention this mean increasing investments in children, human capital and people living from their work through constant learning (Jenson, 2012;Van Kersbergen and Hemerijck, 2012;Hemerijck, 2013). Putting this direction of social policy into practice is associated with terms in the literature such as Active Social State (Vielle, Pochet and Cassiers, 2005), Enabling State (Taylor-Gooby, 2008), Schumpeterian State (Jessop, 1994), Productive Welfare (Holliday, 2000;Hudson and Kühner, 2009), New Welfare State (Bonoli and Natali, 2012) and Social Investment Welfare State (Morel, Palier and Palme, 2012), which is the term used by the author of the present article.…”