Nordic 0 – 24 collaboration on improved services to vulnerable children and young people. First interim report

The Nordic countries are known for their extensive welfare states producing high levels of welfare for their residents across the life course. Still, there are rising concerns related to the situation of vulnerable children and their fam-ilies, not least of which are the early school leavers and young people not in education, employment or training (NEET). In 2017, as a response to these challenges, the Nordic Council of Ministers initiated the Nordic 0–24 project. The overall agenda of the project is to prevent the social exclusion of vulner-able children and young people, and to prevent school dropout and future marginalisation in the labour market. The project’s aim is to improve services in the Nordic countries that are directed at vulnerable children and young people between the ages of 0 and 24 years by means of improving cross-sec-toral collaboration. The project’s starting point is that improved cross-sec-toral collaboration at the state, regional and municipal levels is necessary to provide more coherent, higher quality services. The project comprises cases from all the Nordic countries (Denmark, Fin-land, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) and the autonomous islands (Greenland and Aaland)—the Faroe Islands participate in the Nordic 0–24 project, but without a specific national case. The cases serve as national examples of cross-sectoral collaboration in the delivery of services to the 0–24 age group. The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training is in charge of the project management, and the project period will continue through 2020. Fafo Institute of Labour and Social Research has, in collaboration with VID Specialized University, been assigned the task of carrying out a process eval-uation of the Nordic 0–24 project. In this first interim report from the process evaluation, we provide an overview of the evaluation’s design. Furthermore, we present a model developed to examine how the national cases may serve as sources for identifying factors that contribute to improved collaboration and more coherent service delivery for vulnerable children and young people. As a background for future analyses, the national policy context of the in-volved cases and relevant national welfare systems and services are also de-scribed.publishedVersio

The welfare state matters. On the economic consequences of partnership dissolution in Norway and Britain

Recent sociological observations have indicated that unstable family relations and lone parenthood present new social risks to society, posing a challenge to the welfare state and threatening to increase gender inequality. Several cross-national studies from the US and various European countries have documented that the economic consequences of partnership dissolution are more severe for women than men, indicating that divorce and separation are significant contributors to gender inequality in society. Norway had not previously been included in any such cross-national study, yet research conducted on Norway had indicated that there were few income differences between women and men after partnership dissolution there. This study had two main purposes; first, to introduce Norway into a cross-national comparison investigating whether Norway would be a country with lower levels of gender inequality in post-dissolution incomes, and second, to explore the role the welfare state potentially plays in reducing gender income inequality in relation to partnership dissolution. A case-study approach was applied where Norway was compared with Britain, a country with a well-documented situation of gender income inequality amongst separated persons. Analyses of individual level, longitudinal data were carried out, and different income measures and methodological designs were applied in order to analyse the extent to which partnership dissolution acted as an event leading to a downward shift in household income. This methodological approach was used to argue that dynamic, quantitative research is particularly suited to examine the links between life course changes, gender inequality, and the welfare state. Crucially, this study found that partnership dissolution did not lead to income differences between women and men in Norway, however, in Britain partnership dissolution lead to a larger income gap between women and men. Furthermore, this study found that women and men differed in their economic dependencies following dissolution. Men relied to a larger extent on labour income after dissolution than women did. Norwegian women depended equally on labour market income and on economic transfers to secure their incomes after dissolution. British women were particularly vulnerable, since they had a weaker connection to the labour market than did men and heavier caring responsibilities than men, but at the same time, received little in terms of economic transfers. This significantly increased their poverty risks as a consequence of partnership dissolution. In addition, this study revealed how family policies had shifted over time in both counties to become closer to an ‘adult worker’ norm. However, despite policy developments in the two countries broadly following the same direction, large differences in welfare state institutional systems between the two countries were demonstrated. Norway had a better system for income protection than Britain, largely based on policies that economically compensated parents for having children in the household. This reduced the economic risks of lone mothers in Norway. Although partnership dissolution rates were similar in the two countries studies, the difference in welfare state support was identified as the most important factor in terms of generating cross-national variance in the economic situation of women and men after partnership dissolution. A key finding was thus that the welfare state matters for reducing gender income inequality