engleski

Promoting Social Innovation for Inclusion in the Western Balkans: key challenges

In my contribution I want to discuss the implications of, and move beyond, a dominant ‘coat of paint’ approach to social inclusion and social innovation which suggests that ‘social exclusion’ can be challenged rather easily as it is little more than a ‘surface’ feature of contemporary societies. In an age in which social policy reforms are increasingly residualist and punitive, this approach often fuses with a ‘moral underclass’ discourse which blames people for their own exclusion. Through discussing the drivers and causes of social exclusion in the candidate and prospective candidate countries of the so-called Western Balkans, I want to articulate an alternative approach which explores the local, sub-national/regional, national and supra-national aspects of social innovations for social inclusion. Among these drivers, I will address the following: the shocks of war and conflict ; structural transition and deindustrialization ; the erosion of social capital ; the impacts of the crisis ; and the distortions cause by ‘captured’ social policies and locked in expenditures. In addition, I want to address the problems of category-based social protection and the continued dominance of stigmatizing, discriminatory and over- professionalisied approaches to social problems. I will suggest that, within an externally driven ‘projectised’ reform agenda, there has been an over-emphasis on technical capacities, and a rather economistic understanding of fiscal space, and too little attention to political will and advocacy issues. The possibilities of seeing social inclusion policies and programmes as a form of social investment as a key institutional complementarity to political and economic reforms has largely been ignored in the dominant discourse. Whilst skeptical of ‘statist’ solutions I want to also question an emerging consensus around the importance of NGOs and businesses (largely through the concept of social enterprise) in the region. In the context of growing inequalities, informal marketization and clientelistic social relations, I want to suggest that struggles over public goods, decommodification and the struggle for public space represent the basis for a new regional social policy. In conclusion, I will articulate a set of winnable demands in terms of a regional social protection floor consisting of access to quality community-based services, minumum income schemes, an income for children and social pensions

social innovation; Western Balkans

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