The Transformation of the Local Welfare System in European Cities

In this chapter we argue that LWSs are still important as centralization does not erase the crucial role of local actors in shaping the resources for the local population, and that the local dimension cannot be reduced only to cities and metropolitan contexts, as towns, dispersed localities and rural areas are also part of the issue and cannot be neglected. The chapter reads as follows. In the first section, we focus on the theoretical concept of embeddedness in the analysis of welfare systems. Drawing on the Polanyian tradition, we explain why the classical Esping-Andersen classification (1990) continues to provide a fundamental – though not exhaustive – framework to understand the regimes of welfare capitalisms. As many scholars have shown throughout the last fifteen years (Brenner 2004, McEwan and Moreno 2008 Kazepov 2010), focusing only on the national level cannot explain the specific configurations of welfare capitalism emerging at the local level. We also underline how Mark Granovetter’s (2017) contribution can be useful to frame the embeddedness of welfare systems particularly at the local level. In the second section, we argue for the distinctive role played by the European Union and the principle of subsidiarity in the rearrangement of the national welfare states. They laid down the conditions for the raise of LWS. It is not by chance that the concept of LWS originated in the EU. In the third section, we argue that the concept of LWSs is more appropriate compared to the urban welfare system, as the latter is a specific type (an example) of the former. We consider the socially and territorially embedded nature of needs and provisions of welfare, which emerge both in urban and in rural areas. In the fourth section, we focus on the dynamic of differentiation between urban and rural areas in European regions. The capacity for both social and political actors to mobilize their repertoires of action at the local level is addressed in the fifth section as part of the explanation for this process of differentiation. In the conclusion we propose some conditions for the transformation of welfare and social protection to tackle the increasing heterogeneity and inequalities of local welfare systems, focussing also on the current pandemic crisis which is further exacerbating territorial inequalities.