Agents of institutional change in EU policy: the social investment moment

ABSTRACT

The contribution addresses – through actor-centred historical institutionalism – why and how social investment (SI) emerged at the European Union (EU) level. SI policies built on the institutional basis of the policy co-ordination processes in employment and social inclusion, which originated in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The pre-existent processes represented the necessary but not sufficient condition for the EU SIP to materialise. The decisive factor was the activity of three types of entrepreneurs – intellectual, bureaucratic and political – that enabled the crystallization of the EU Social Investment package (SIP) through issue-framing, institutional alignment and consensus-building. Despite this, the SIP of 2013 ended as a ‘social investment moment’ that rapidly lost momentum because no additional measures such as indicators or funds were integrated with SIP. Furthermore, the Commission’s political priorities changed and the key entrepreneurs that had been active for the materialisation of the SIP were no longer centre stage. The continued presence of former influential entrepreneurs in the EU policy arena, although in different roles, may enable integration of EU SI into new EU social policy initiatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Actor-centred institutionalism
• EU social policy
• European Union
• historical institutionalism
• policy entrepreneur
• social investment

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank three anonymous referees, the participants of the October 2017 Work-in-progress seminar of the Department of Business and Politics, CBS and Margarita Leon for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Caroline de la Porte is Professor MSO of European and comparative welfare governance and policy and head of the Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School.

David Natali is professor of comparative and EU politics at the S. Anna School of Advanced Studies of Pisa, and associate researcher at the European Social Observatory of Brussels.

Notes

1 While entrepreneurs among stakeholders may also be relevant to consider, they rarely have a formal role in the policy process. This differentiates them from the other actors under examination in this contribution.

2 The SIP also included a Recommendation on ‘Investing in Children: Breaking the cycle of disadvantage’ and a series of Staff Working Documents.

3 Various international organizations’ work on indicators that could be considered to assess some aspects of SI. However, DG ECFIN and member states are reluctant to adopt and use such indicators at EU level, while DG EMPL is favourable to such indicators.