Poverty is a widespread and persistent phenomenon in Europe. Even in periods of solid economic growth and a dynamic labour market, macro-level welfare policies have struggled to find adequate answers to address poverty and social exclusion (Cantillon et al, 2019). In this context, local social innovations have attracted a lot of attention from European, national and local policy makers and social scientists. Are they a source of new ideas, resources, instruments and actors for welfare provision, with the potential of transforming macrolevel welfare policies (Unger, 2015)? Or are they mere extensions or implementation vehicles of currently dominant macro-level welfare policies, reaching out to the local level and intervening in the daily life of impoverished and excluded social groups? Or, alternatively, do they plug the holes left by macro-level welfare policies and market dynamics (Moulaert et al, 2017), whether or not providing alternatives to established forms of social intervention.

In this book, we chose to situate local social innovations within the particular welfare-institutional context in which they operate, focusing on housing, inclusive education and labour market activation. We paid attention to both the specific profile of social needs and risks in the area as well as to the multi-scalar welfare regimes existing in the specific domains in which social innovation initiatives attempt to make a difference. This allowed us to investigate how local social innovations operate as vehicles of welfare reform, rather than approaching them in a decontextualised way as individual initiatives the social impact of which can be evaluated in isolation from the broader welfareinstitutional context. This book is based on in-depth and qualitative studies of 31 local social innovations combating poverty and social exclusion in seven European countries and Brazil and looked at how they are both shaped by and implicated in the ongoing transformation of multi-scalar welfare regimes. This provides us with an empirically rich understanding of how localised social innovations are currently governed in Europe, an analysis that is enriched by the contrasting dynamics in Brazil (before the radical turn to the right over recent years). This concluding chapter provides an overview of our main findings from the case studies and based on these empirical results modifies our understanding of social innovation and its governance accordingly.