Impact
The research results will be informative on several major questions:
- it will inform EU and national policy makers about the preferences and world view of local policy makers, which may help to initiate a constructive dialogue between different policy levels and vertical policy integration.
- it will provide a systematic and evidence based account of the causes and effects of local welfare systems.
- it will document and analyse which policies and institutional regulations that promote the employment of women, and under which condition the integration of women into the labour market leads to social equality and social cohesion
- it will identify social cleavages associated with gender that hinder the process of social cohesion
- it will document how successful and effective governance structures for care and human capital investment have improved female labour market participation over the life course
- it will describe successful governance structures and how an effective division of responsibilities between individuals, organisations and (local and national) governments can be orchestrated
- it will map how motives, preferences and dispositions of women are constructed (and why), which in turn may help to develop new policies for the integration of women into the labour market
- if data shows that specific groups of women are subject to particular forms of discrimination the research may provide arguments in favour of (and the elements for) a new European ‘legislation’ to combat such discrimination
- it will systematically identify under which cultural, social, political and institutional conditions social cohesion, growth and employment of women will take place.
Several steps will be needed in order to transform these insights into the widest possible impact.
The first of these is to integrate project findings within national and international social science communities. In this context the project can contribute to the advancement of inter-disciplinary and comprehensive approaches in the analysis and assessment of local welfare systems favouring social cohesion. All partners have already demonstrated their excellence in diffusing new theoretical and empirical insights into the academic community. This type of activity, however, will be substantially expanded.
Steps will be taken to organise and exchange knowledge with political representatives, interest groups and other political actors at the EU, national and local level. It is not the intention just to inform this circle of actors about the research results, but also to enter into a dialogue in order to adapt feedback and suggestions to make our findings of some practical use to political and social communities. In this dialogue, the quality of this project will be that it is able to identify the policies and institutional arrangements that will help to improve the employment of women and social cohesion, as well as provide explanations as to why some localities achieve progress much more easily than others. As such, an off-spring of the project is that it will definitely be able to provide urban policy recommendations for local welfare system improvement.
Especially, steps will be taken to establish close collaboration with two local welfare service providers in each country, preferable by including them actively in the research process. The aim is to bridge research and policy, to validate research through active dialogues and promote policy learning. This collaboration will lead to new understandings about how practical opportunities and restrictions of service providers are structured by the local welfare system, local cultural orientations, and degrees of social cohesion. The local service providers will contribute with their experiences and assessments, and help researchers to identify promising practices.
