The climate crisis poses a series of urgent challenges for public policies, and it is crucial to find ways to achieve global ecological sustainability while ensuring human well-being for all. In Europe, the welfare state – with social protection and social services as the two core pillars – plays...
In Budapest, we met with Prof. Dorottya Szikra, Research Professor at the Centre for Social Sciences. We invited her to understand better her research on illiberal and populist social policymaking in Hungary and Turkey, and the role of social policy in processes of democratic backsliding. Do you think that...
How are social services conceptualised, legally defined and regulated (directly or indirectly) across different strands of EU law? How do EU legal rules delimit the scope of national intervention in social services? To what extent do relevant EU legal frameworks create normative tensions or ambiguities that affect national social...
Climate change, demographic ageing, labour market restructuring, and growing social inequalities create major challenges for welfare states and raise questions about how to organise social protection and public investment in social services and policies in a way that is both socially fair and environmentally sustainable. In the paper “Macro-regularities...
The recent resolution of the European Parliament on a future EU Anti-Poverty Strategy marks an important political moment. While the report describes the need for increased social investment, it still falls short on describing further how this paradigm shift could become a turning point to social inclusion, with direct effects...
Welfare states provide social benefits both in cash and in kind. In Europe, cash benefits include income transfers, such as retirement pensions, family benefits and unemployment allowances, while in-kind benefits are usually derived from the use of publicly provided services, such as healthcare, education, early childhood care and care...
Social services and policies (including but not limited to education, healthcare, early childhood care, long-term care, family planning, housing support, and active labour market policies) have been identified as pivotal drivers of sustainable competitiveness and inclusive prosperity. They are considered to be productive institutions that expand individual and collective...
SWINS introduces an impact oriented framework to assess the transformative returns of investment in social policies and services, combining conceptual advances with methodological innovation. The added value of the project approach rests on three pillars: An integrated methodological toolkit, which allows us to capture both individual behaviours and systemic...
