The Welfare State and Social Innovation

The course provides students with the tools for the political understanding of recent transformation of the welfare state in terms of social innovation and welfare mix. For almost three decades, European countries have been striving to reform their social models, tailored on increasingly surpassed economic, socio-demographic and cultural structures. Reforms introduced at the national level, largely focused on the large programs of social protection, do not exhaust the array of ongoing transformations. In order to understand the breadth and nature of changes, this course moves beyond the perimeter of the public sector, directing attention towards recent developments in the market as well as in the third sector and civil society, and especially towards those new forms of intertwinement, collaboration and synergy that have been emerging between these two spheres (and often between them and the public sector) in welfare provision.

Students who attend the course will be able to address the issue of why different countries implement different social measures and policies, especially in times of crisis and in terms of social innovation; explore important concepts in the field of comparative social policy, including social citizenship, risk sharing, de-commodification, welfare mix, public-private partnership, social innovation, social investment; examine the forces driving welfare regimes' development in Western nations; analyze contemporary policy issues affecting Western welfare states, including globalization, demographic aging, labor market instability, gender equality, vulnerability and social exclusion, migration, populism; envisage the social and economic consequences of processes of welfare state crisis and the emergence of the "second welfare" paradigm; identify different approaches to explaining institutional variety in advanced welfare systems; examine the relevance of tools and frameworks for the study of Western welfare states and their recent transformation.