Conference Agenda

Many European countries have undergone some form of welfare state transition in the last four decades but the COVID pandemic and other polycrises have intensified the pressures on welfare services. In the UK there is a growing awareness that the effects of New Public Management combined with 15 years of austerity measures have led to a deterioration of public services and decay of public institutions, resulting in increased inequalities, a decrease in life expectancy, and rising levels of poverty and destitution.

Welfare professionals are attempting to deliver quality public services but are unable to cope with the demand, resulting in deteriorating quality of public services, poor working conditions, lack of pay increases during a period of high inflation and high turnover of staff, thus undermining the foundations of public services. This situation threatens the social contract and societal values which underpinned the creation of the Welfare State, and it poses particular challenges for welfare professionals. How can welfare professionals use evidence to support the day-to-day running of services which are overstretched and underfunded and maintain professional standards? Longer term, how can welfare professionals use evidence to influence a new welfare state and new eco-social contract supported by professional activities?

The paper will review some of the recent literature on the relationship between a social contract and welfare professionals. It will explore recent dilemmas by analysing the 2024 Households Below Average Income (HBAI) report, published by the UK government, from the perspective of how welfare professionals could use this data to inform future professional strategies and standards. The HBAI report is published annually and highlights five main themes which directly inform the demand for specific public services: employment/ income; housing, children/ education/ early years services, older people’s services and food security. Although focusing on the 2022-23 period, the report provides comparisons with the period 2003-2023. The paper will examine the roles – leaders, supporters, technical advisers – that welfare professionals are starting to develop when harnessing evidence.

This study examines the application of evidence-based governance within India's welfare state, guided by the theoretical frameworks of the Knowledge-Policy Interaction (KPI) and the New Public Management (NPM). It explores how evidence is integrated from the policy design stage through to implementation, involving a diverse array of professionals and community actors. The research is structured around the interplay between theory and practice, assessing the impact of data-driven decision-making on the effectiveness of welfare policies in adapting to societal needs and technological advancements.

The KPI framework provides a lens to analyze the dynamics between knowledge generation (evidence and data) and policy-making processes, emphasizing the role of various stakeholders including researchers, politicians, and professionals. This framework helps in understanding the channels through which evidence influences policy decisions and the barriers to its utilization. Concurrently, the NPM framework is utilized to investigate the efficiency and effectiveness of evidence-based approaches within the public sector, focusing on innovations in governance models that incorporate private sector practices and emphasize outcome-based approaches. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the study incorporates both qualitative interviews with policymakers and quantitative analysis of welfare outcomes to explore the adoption and impact of evidence-based strategies across India's diverse regions. The research highlights how digital technologies and artificial intelligence are pivotal in shaping new governance models, enhancing the precision and responsiveness of welfare services.

Key areas of focus include the transformation of professional roles within the welfare sector due to increasing digitalization, requiring new competencies and reshaping traditional practices. The study also investigates the role of community participation in the policymaking process, assessing how evidence-based methods affect policy acceptance and the practical implementation of welfare initiatives. Furthermore, the research delves into innovative evaluation methods in the health and social policy arenas, examining their effectiveness in capturing broader social impacts and their implications for defining societal values within the welfare context. The evolving interaction between policy design, evaluation, and the continuous quest for relevant data is critically analyzed, providing insights into the challenges and opportunities presented by evidence-based governance.

In summary, this abstract outline a comprehensive exploration of how theoretical frameworks like KPI and NPM can elucidate the complex processes involved in integrating evidence into public welfare governance. By examining India's approach to these challenges, the study contributes to both theoretical and practical advancements in welfare policy, offering scalable insights for improving governance efficiency and societal outcomes in diverse global settings.

This study explores the integration of public values and public value creation within Hybrid Organizations (HOs) engaged in social care services. Proposing an integrative framework, our research explores how public values, discerned at the organizational level, guide the process of public value creation. Focusing on a case study of an HO dedicated to providing social care services for children and marginalized adults in Milan, Italy, our analysis unveils a process-based perspective. This perspective encompasses the identification of public values, their transformation into tangible public value outcomes, the operational activities essential for their delivery, and the establishment of effective measurement systems. Our primary finding underscores the substantial support for public value creation within HOs, highlighting its inherent multi-dimensional nature. Additionally, our investigation reveals that the motivation to identify public values and measure public value creation serves as a strategic tool to withstand political pressures, rather than the pure pursuit of identifying and sharing the foundational principles of the organization.

Innovative job-creation schemes are gaining momentum. In light of the ESF+ call for piloting such (as announced in April 2024), one of the key puzzles facing potential initiators is how to design the pilots: what design choices should be incorporated to maximise the chances of the project for being scaled-up in case of success? While the existing research indicates that the way policy pilots are designed affects their scaling prospects, there is no systemic understanding of how: the evidence is limited, mixed, and scattered across policy domains (yet lacking in the domain of job-creation policies).

To help fill the gap, this study offers an integrated analysis of implications that the design of policy pilots may have for their scaling prospects. Three novel employment programs that fit into different design types – boundary Zero Long-Term Unemployment Territories, TZCLD (France), technocratic MAGMA Job Guarantee (Austria), and advocacy Kinofelis Ergasia (Greece) – are compared along three design-dimensions – resource autonomy of initiator, network architecture, and knowledge production and dissemination – to study how the differences in their design have affected their adoption trajectories.

The results demonstrate that while individual design choices are invariably ambiguous in their implications, the “comparative advantage” of each program is associated with a different design dimension: resource autonomy for advocacy Kinofelis, network architecture for boundary TZCLD, and knowledge production for technocratic MAGMA.

Based on the lessons learnt from the analysis, the study concludes with hands-on recommendations on “how to design better” – hoping to inform further pilot launches, both in the domain of job-creation policies and beyond.