Enhancing the Visibility of Social Europe: A Practical Agenda for ‘The Last Mile’

The contribution deals with the \u2018catalogue\u2019 of suggestions Ferrera has made to make EU social citizenship more visible and salient. As widely acknowledged in the literature, social policy institutions have historically served key political functions for state and nation building purposes in Western countries, including in federal systems, where social citizenship has been used as an element to foster unity. Within the EU\u2019s multi-level framework, the possibility to exploit the legitimating and credit claiming potential of supranational social programmes for polity-building and maintenance is undermined by two elements: on the one hand, the small size of the EU social budget and, on the other hand, the indirect way of functioning of supranational programmes that makes social Europe scarcely visible to citizens at the \u201clast mile\u201d of the implementation chain. This contribution addresses the latter issue, by discussing some initiatives going in the direction of empowering and making the stakes of European social citizenship more tangible, also for non-mobile EU citizens

Work-life balance policies as a multi-level, multi-stakeholder policy challenge : the case of Territorial Networks for Conciliation in Lombardy

Work-life balance policies represent an interesting case in the perspective of \u2018second welfare\u2019, which imply the participation of a number of non-public actors for the co-production of welfare. Compared to European figures, Italian women display high levels of inactivity, hiking after the birth of the first child, unbalanced care responsibilities with respect to men, inadequate childcare support and work arrangements. However, thanks to a number of stimuli from the EU, in the last decade work-life balance policies have gained some salience within the domestic political debate. In particular, at the sub-national level we have observed a proliferation of initiatives. Building on this framework, the research investigates the co-production of reconciliation policies in a multidimensional, multilevel, and multi-stakeholder perspective, by shedding light on innovative dynamics. In this respect, the Lombardy Region represents an intriguing case. In 2011, with the Regional White Paper on reconciling work and family, the territory was divided into 13 areas, and each one is now experimenting a network for the governance at the local level of work-life balance policies named Territorial Network for Conciliation, TNC - participated by public institutions, trade unions and employers representatives, as well as private companies, cooperatives and the Third sector - in charge of monitoring the needs of each territory, coordinating efforts, setting up new and innovative conciliation services

L'Unione europea contro la deprivazione materiale severa : continuità e innovazione nel Fondo di aiuti europei agli indigenti

The present contribution deals with a recent European social initiative that was launched in 2014 in order to contrast severe material deprivation: the Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived (FEAD). The aim of the article is two-fold. First, from a descriptive standpoint, it offers an overview of the main institutional features of this novel component of the European social sphere, meant to provide substance to the lower tier of pan-European solidarity. Second, from an interpretative standpoint, the paper reconstructs the political and institutional dynamics behind the adoption of the program. Despite its narrow budget and scope, findings show that adopting the FEAD was a contested and controversial decision that fostered the emergence of harsh tensions. Interestingly, notwithstanding the frictions that emerged, the institutional and political sponsorship of the program proved to be strong enough to have the initiative approved and strengthened during the policy-making process