With a view on the big challenges to societies, political and social systems in Europe, small entities have found increasing attention – social innovations (SIs). But what can they contribute? How to understand them properly? And how to establish a positive interaction between them and public policies for reform? In this field of concerns an EU-funded international research project, called "Welfare Innovations at the Local Level in favour of Cohesion” (WILCO) asked more specifically, how, with respect to the major challenge of social inclusion, SIs can contribute to find better coping strategies, both by themselves and through ways their innovative nudges are taken up by the established local welfare systems. This implies to study both sides, the projects that represent social innovations and the developments within welfare systems. This paper focuses on one side of this relationship, the SIs themselves. It is based on the information and experiences of case studies from more than 80 SIs in twenty cities and ten states in Europe. The way in which the authors describe and analyse approaches and instruments used by these local projects with a strong innovative dimension aims at building bridges between the often separated social innovation debates on the one and the wider debate on reforms in public policies, and welfare systems on the other hand. In the following the authors: (1.) sketch shortly the way they went to work in the WILCO research on social innovations; then in the main part (2.) they present what they see as approaches and instruments, that public policies could use and learn from, before (3.) raising in the conclusion some questions about the difficulties of welfare systems and related public policies in learning. [Adapted from the Authors’ abstract].
Evers, Adalbert and Ewert, Benjamin (2013) Social innovation for social cohesion. Findings on communalities of innovation from a new transnational study (Paper presented at the international conference Social Frontiers : The next edge of social innovation research, at GCU's London Campus on 14th and 15th November 2013).
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