Introduction

The widespread and persistent poverty in Europe, one of the richest regions of the world, has attracted increasing policy and research interest over the last few years (Cantillon et al, 2019). Over recent years, hope has been put in the flourishing of socially innovative initiatives to combat poverty. Examples include social groceries, indebtedness help desks, Housing First initiatives, ecological work integration social enterprises, buddy systems, cooperatives of informal workers and dedicated training schemes for the long-term unemployed. Because many of these initiatives are highly localised and – at least in their origins – small-scale, their impact on the problem of poverty and social exclusion should be assessed in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. More concretely, the wider significance of these initiatives is in their capacity to renew and transform welfare institutions. As Brandsen and colleagues (2016a: 309) claim, there is a ‘one-sided representation of welfare state reform as a primarily top-down process, giving priority to regulating and standardizing over securing open spaces for social innovation. … It ignores the basic role of experimentation and bottomup innovation in nudging and realizing successful reforms’. In order to redress this imbalance in academic accounts of welfare reform, the analysis of social innovation in this book will focus on how it is shaped by and impacts on welfare institutions and governance structures and associated power structures. This implies looking at its localised and multi-scalar character, at how it involves a complex set of actors in the provision of welfare and at the combination of resources, actors and instruments from various policy fields and spatial scales (for a similar approach, see the Welfare Innovations at the Local Level in favour of Cohesion project described in Brandsen et al, 2016a).

Hence, when focusing on the widely varying institutional contexts in which local social innovations operate, we are confronted with various governance questions. How can the welfare mix, which is made more complex by the mobilisation of new actors, resources and instruments in social innovation initiatives, be governed and fragmentation avoided? How do social innovation initiatives mobilise and integrate actors, instruments and resources across a variety of spatial scales? How do social innovation initiatives articulate with more or less established social policy paradigms such as social protection and social investment?