Background and concept
Rationale behind IDELE
IDELE is a key element of the European Commission’s activity to encourage the exchange of good practice and networking in local employment development (LED). The local level has been recognised in EU policy since 1984 and has gained in importance through the Commission’s White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness and Employment in 1993 and the European Employment Strategy in 1997. While policies at other levels—macro-economic, structural and regional/sectoral—continued to address the broader competitiveness and cohesion agenda at the level of the economic system as a whole, a policy that proposed to use local actors to seek out local solutions had (and continues to have) strong appeal.
At the end of two decades of experimentation and significant funding both for pilot actions and under Structural Funds measures, there is a need to review what has been learned, and disseminate and exchange the lessons from practice. Local actors are becoming more involved in capturing employment and development for their areas and it is important to recognise this. While EU programmes have been a significant spur to action, IDELE provides an opportunity to capture learning from a much wider social movement. IDELE also has the capacity to look at how the overall aim of the EES is being achieved by actions in the wider local setting.
Possibilities for local action
When the local approach came to play an increasing role in the policy frameworks of the EU and a number of Member States (during the 1980s and 1990s), it was chiefly envisioned as an instrument of unemployment policy and this has determined its development pathway. From the perspective of economic analysis, LED is seen to work on both the supply and the demand side.
On the supply side, it offers a means to mobilise labour to adapt to new work opportunities and to acquire relevant skills by drawing the unemployed and socially excluded along ‘pathways to integration’ with strongly local points of entry. On the demand side, it is a means to prospect for new sources of jobs at the local level—particularly by identifying those service gaps and market failures that were unfilled by private enterprise or public provision as service demands changed faster than orthodox responses. With a re-awakening of interest in social enterprise and the social economy, another demand side option has been to stimulate alternative forms of enterprise within local communities that gave both the prospect of addressing gaps in ‘proximity services’ and the chance that the locally unemployed could create ‘tailor-made jobs’ by acting as social entrepreneurs.
Another entry point to the possibilities of action at the local level has come from the orthodox perspective of market economics and from the logic of arguments about market failure. Indeed, the essence of the highly influential LDEI initiative that emanated from the European Commission’s Cellule de Prospective in 1996 was to position local action as an instrument to address existing and emergent market failures in a fast moving economy.
Conceptual framework to IDELE
A conceptual paper has been developed during the first year of IDELE process. It explains the essence of both the local employment development concept and IDELE. It highlights the importance of context, whether it is cultural, geographical, governance, economic or linguistic. It goes to demonstrating and extracting the value added of local employment development and expresses the particular value of local partnerships and some key parameters of success. The paper also outlines some basic principles for establishing and sustaining local employment development actions.
- Conceptual framework to IDELE [pdf, en, 113kb]
