Posted by cooperatoby in cooperative, EU, social economy.
Tags: co-operative, energy, EU, finance
Michael Stephenson at the EP on 1 Dec 09
With 29 MPs, the
Co-operative Party is the 4th-largest party at Westminster. (It is by the way the only co-operative party in the world, apart from the Cooperative NATCCO Network Party, which holds one seat in the Philippine House of Representatives). It was founded in 1917 and has had a Brussels branch since 1982. On 1st December its General Secretary, Michael Stephenson, came to the European Parliament to talk to us. And unwittingly we seem to have held the first meeting the Parliament has hosted on the subject of co-operatives for about 10 years.
He pointed to a renaissance of co-operativism in Britain; in the last decade NHS foundation trusts, co-operative trust schools and football supporter’s trusts have all brought consumer co-operation into new fields. Even the village shop in Ambridge is organising a community share issue! Two areas where a start has been made but much remains to be done are housing and energy.
The financial crisis has shown the strength of mutualism in housing finance – they tend not to freeze credit, they charge lower interest rates, and their structure is intrinsically more stable. Yet, incredibly, the city establishment seems locked in to its unsustainable greed-based model. Till now, the public seems to have naively retained its faith in the esoteric knowledge that financiers claim to have. But at last polls are showing that the RBS directors’ attempt at blackmail to preserve bonuses may be the straw that has broken the camel’s back. It may mark the downfall of the Tory claims to be the party of the poor.
In energy, a cluster of co-operative wind farms like
Westmill shows that ethical investors are keen to do their bit against climate change, and the movment is running a well-thought-out campaign on climate change,
ACT!.
The meeting chimed well with an initiative of
Co-operatives Europe to launch a
Network of Co-operative MEPs, whose first meeting takes place in Strasbourg on 14th December, part of a campaign to raise the co-operative movement’s profile in European politics. Two coming opportunities are the EU2020 consultation and the inaugural hearings of the new Commissioners.
Co-operatives have a unique political offer. They are in the lead on a number of issues with which the public engages, such as fair trade and climate change, but they haven’t got the best out of the system. The movement’s job is to put together the narrative and the evidence to create the impact they deserve to have. Right now the Labour Party is receptive to new ideas – so there is a real chance that co-operative solutions will be taken up.
Posted by cooperatoby in EU, social economy.
Tags: co-operative, EU, social economy, social innovation
Reflections on the EESC seminar of 22nd October 2009
The European Economic and Social Committee held a seminar on 22nd October 2009 on the subject Getting to the End of the Tunnel: Creating the Right Environment for the Social Economy.
Social innovation was on the agenda and one of the speakers was Matteo Bonifacio from the Bureau of European Policy Advisers (BEPA), the Commission’s think tank on future policy that has taken over from the Future Studies Unit.
He noted that, today, economic and social challenges are becoming indistinguishable. This poses policy makers with a question: social issues can be addressed either as a separate complement to economic policy, or by viewing the two as inseparable. You can view the social economy as “the enterprises that do the rest” – what business enterprises don’t do – or you can take the view that all enterprises have a social responsibility. In other words, he posed the distinction between targeted policy – things like prizes and incubators for social entrepreneurs – and mainstreaming – making “social” a key word in all policies that make up the post-Lisbon strategy.
A number of Commission DGs are working on social innovation, and BEPA had held a seminar on the subject on 19-20 January 2009. A report will be published probably in February 2010, after consultation throughout the Commission.
Speaking from the floor, I argued two points:
1. Mainstreaming can go too far
The social economy, by definition, combines private and public resources. The main public source of financial support for its development has in practice been the European Social Fund (ESF). Its high point has been EQUAL, which had a €3 bn budget over 6 years. The social economy was the 3rd most popular theme, with 424 development partnerships in 18 member states accounting for about 9% of that sum.
The problem is that now EQUAL is over, there is now no Community Initiative in the ESF, and the momentum and visibility that had been built up has been lost. Where is the follow-up?
What has survived is a seven-country learning network led by Poland, which is part of the Learning for Change programme, and is designed to build the capacity of the public administrations and key stakeholders to manage the ESF better. The Better Future for the Social Economy (BFSE) network addresses the key European issues for the social economy – public procurement, impact measurement, state aid, SSGIs, finance and social franchising. But it has a relatively small budget – about half a million euros.
It’s not true that all has been lost – the Swedish and Spanish examples presented at the conference show that progress is still being made – but work on the ground is now fragmented and incoherent. The social economy and inclusive entrepreneurship is explicitly mentioned in about 30% of the 117 new ESF operational programmes but it’s very difficult to get an overview of what’s happening. The “brain” of the innovation system in the ESF has been disconnected.
So, the policy of transferring the learning of EQUAL into the mainstream ESF seems to have backfired. There is still an important place for targeted policy, especially where innovation is concerned.
2. The social economy as social innovator
Mr Bonifacio wondered whether the distinction between the social economy and CSR was negligible. I think it is very far from that. The BEPA seminar on social innovation did include “citizen” representatives from the Social Platform (for instance from the European Anti-Poverty Network), and it did include individual examples of social economy initiatives (such as San Patrignano). But it did not include the social economy as an organised sector or movement, and this is symptomatic of what seems to be a persistent blind spot in EU policy.
Social innovation is about meeting people’s needs in new ways, and in order to do that it needs to connect with citizens and find out what those changing needs are. This relies on stimulating the participation of citizens. And it is the social economy that is the way of organising citizen participation in the economy. Therefore, the social economy must be involved in systematic efforts to promote social innovation. To overlook this means that you waste the capacity of the social economy to network, to spread new ideas and transfer expertise. It is folly to ignore the strength of the social economy as a mutual support system.
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Posted by cooperatoby in EU.
Tags: EU, mainstreaming
It is rare for policy-makers to confess their errors, so some honest rueful contrition makes a welcome change. Speaking at a meeting of QeC-ERAN: 20 Years of European Urban Policy in the Halles St-Géry in Brussels on 24th June, Dirk Ahner , Director General of the European Commission’s Regional Policy DG, did just such a thing. He explained that the rationale behind mainstreaming was to make more money available for the sort of integrated development projects that the URBAN Community Initiative had supported. These were projects that:
- tackled exclusion and disadvantage
- combined hard and soft measures
- achieved social, economic and environmental goals
- were based on community ownership and local partnerships with the private sector
But instead, as it has turned out in the wash, local government is disjointed. ERDF programmes are in the hands of individual ministries which have gone back to promoting sectoral projects in areas such as transport and the environment, denying cities a voice. The learning of URBAN has been largely forgotten.
There is now probably €30 bn being invested in urban development – a vast improvement on URBAN’s €700m budget – but much of it is not being applied in the way the optimists intended.
By the way I’m still puzzled by the way the Sixth R&D Framework Programme’s problem-oriented structure was abandoned when it came to FP7. FP6 had a Key Action called The City of Tomorrow which seemed to be going in exactly the right direction, but evidently joined-up thinking is as hard to do in the lab as it is on the ground.
I suppose that there will always be a pendulum swing between phases of integration and targeting – after a period of multiple initiatives, these were slimmed down to two (EQUAL & URBAN) and now none. At a moment when the operational programmes for the 2007-2013 programming period are taking shape, it’s salutary to be reminded of the dangers of mainstreaming. You can mainstream good things out of existence too.
Posted by cooperatoby in cooperative, social economy.
Tags: co-operative, EU, social innovation
Social innovation isn’t a new idea, but it is fashionable, particularly since EU Commission president Barroso has taken up the idea as a rallying cry. It is clear that innovation is far more than developing a new product and bringing it successfully to market, as innovation policy has it. We can’t ignore the far more interesting and difficult realm of the new social relations that are needed to support such new phenomena of consumption.
But what is social innovation? Is it more than another of the periodic rebranding exercises that lay down an every thicker palimpsest of buzzwords: local employment development, community economic development, local development… local employment initiatives, local initiatives for development and employment… corporate social responsibility, social responsibility of enterprises, territorial social responsibility… co-operatives, community co-operatives, community businesses, community enterprises, social enterprises, social entrepreneurship, social businesses, even social business enterprises…
It’s hard to choose among these, so how do we decide which are worth more than the others? It seems we have to go back to first principles. Who benefits and who controls? If social innovation as a process is “the design and implementation of creative ways of meeting social needs” then it is about ways of:
- listening to society as it voices what it needs
- deciding which is the appropriate vehicle to meet those needs, whether through state action, business or community action
- enabling people to act for themselves to meet as many needs as possible
To build new initiatives you need communication networks, that allow messages to circulate efficiently, and joint projects to be built up incrementally. Responsive communication can certainly be helped by new technologies – collaborative tools like wikis and YouTube. But it also relies on structures to put productive activity within the feedback loop, to put citizens in charge of economic activity.
Of all the flavours of participative democracy, it is co-operativism that has consistently, for 114 years or more, provided this bedrock. It delivers economic and social benefits to people whom it values as individuals. That’s why social innovation should have a large component of co-operativism, and the co-operative movement should give its all to promote social innovation.
Posted by cooperatoby in EU.
Tags: EU, gender
I was at a meeting yesterday between the Commission and several member states, in my capacity as a technical assistance expert. There were 25 of us crammed round the table. Half an hour in, the Bonn delegation arrived from the station. Immediately, a several people got up and offered their seats to the newcomers, themselves moving back to some spare seats against the wall. What was remarked upon when the dust had settled was that it was three women from the technical assistance team who had given way so graciously. I have to confess it hadn’t entered my male mind that I had less right to sit in the front row than anyone else!
Posted by cooperatoby in EU, social economy.
Tags: EU, mainstreaming, social economy, solipsism
With any luck it will get more profound than that.
One thing that’s been on my mind festering for a while is the idea of ‘mainstreaming‘. This is one step up from dissemination, in that instead of just telling the world about your discovery or your policy idea, you actually undertake some steps to persuade those with their hands on the levers of power to actually do something. So for instance if you run an experimental project and show that something works, you then invite local politicians to see round, take them out to dinner, make sure it fits with electoral cycles etc. At first glance it’s a very excellent idea, designed to put an end to white elephants by linking public expenditure to improving public policy, and making sure we learn from our history.
However it seems to me to have perverse effects sometimes, because the good work you’re doing out in the field is relegated to second-best, below what those at the top think of it. The welfare of the real people in the real world becomes a distant irrelevance, and the views and prejudices of policy-makers become the chief concern. So the whole policy-making machine starts to go round in circles eating its own tail. What is a good idea and can do good out there in the real world is written off because it’s infeasible in the elites’ minds. In short, mainstreaming can degenerate into solipsism.
Even more bizarrely, policy solipsists can start to see a concern for the outside world as solipsism itself; practical proposals to improve the operation of, to take an example, social economy institutions, may be dismissed as “technical”, even though those institutions do a lot of good and world serve public policy objectives if they worked better.
