Seminars
Seminar 10
Fresh approaches to employment activation and sustainable communities: lessons for the competitiveness and employment regions
Bologna, Italy, 27–28 April 2006
The Bologna Seminar is focused on those regions that will benefit from the Regional Competitiveness and Employment Objective within the EU Structural Funds, i.e. all those not eligible under the Convergence Objective. Member States will designate the specific areas and strategies for the allocation of funds through their National Strategic Reference Frameworks and their strategies will be set out in the Operational Programmes. The more limited allocation of overall funding makes it likely that the ‘hard to solve’ problem cases will be designated by the Member States, e.g. those previously eligible under Objective Two. These regions and localities will continue to display endemic and sustained unemployment and social exclusion but with far less EU funding. They will be anxious to find the most efficient and effective solutions for their long standing problems.
There is now a long track record of local partnerships approaches to employment development, particularly in the EU15 countries. The EU Structural Funds have been particularly important in stimulating and/or supporting these approaches—but such funding will be vastly reduced in the 2007–13 period, at least for the Regional Competitiveness and Employment regions and countries. In some cases, local partnerships have found their own funding, for example by operating as social enterprises, by winning contracts from (national or regional) public authorities or by generating local funds.
However, of particular interest to the Bologna seminar will be examples of mainstream national or regional policies and programmes that have recognised the value of local approaches to employment development and enabled a diversity of local partnerships and local actions to flourish. The seminar will demonstrate how such local approaches can meet specifically local needs whilst simultaneously contributing to the objectives of national and regional policy—provided that they are given significant freedom and not squeezed into rigid national frameworks. Examples include the Italian Patti Territoriale or Local Partnerships in Ireland.
The need to reduce the level of state benefit to some groups of the unemployed and inactive (for example, through the Hartz IV reforms in Germany) and to get excluded people into work is giving the local a potentially much enhanced role in national policies. There is a dimension of the ‘flexicurity’ debate, therefore, that needs to be opened up outside the workplace and in the local community in the sense that persuading people to shift from a more stable system of benefits to a more flexible one of ‘work activation’ has a powerful resonance on how local communities in the poorest areas will thrive and survive.
The Bologna Seminar will therefore address issues such as job activation (for the young, the old, the minority ethnic groups, etc.); developing social capital and the social economy; sustainable communities and the strategies that can bring them together in a concerted programme of locally driven regeneration. The subtext for the event will be to examine how the Lisbon process and the transformation of the European social model in the Member States are being played out locally.
Seminar documents
- Agenda [pdf, en, 72kb]
- Background note [pdf, en, 56kb]
Examples of good practice
- Bologna, Italy – Job activation in the Province of Bologna [pdf, en, 24kb]
- London, UK – Clapham Park Project [pdf, en, 36kb]
- Amsterdam, Netherlands – Entrepreneur House [pdf, en, 41kb]
- s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands – Job activation in the Municipality of s-Hertogenbosch [pdf, en, 28kb]
- Leuven, Belgium – IGO-Leuven [pdf, en, 88kb]
- Luxembourg – Réseau Objectif Plein Emploi [pdf, en, 31kb]
- Papendrecht, Netherlands – Work Center [pdf, en, 35kb]
- Germany – Perspektive 50Plus: Employment Pacts for older people in the regions [pdf, en, 37kb]
- Shropshire, UK – Shropshire Partnership [pdf, en, 37kb]
- Lombardy, Italy – UPAL: Network on Active Labour Market Policies- [pdf, en, 32kb]
- Netherlands – Work and Social Assistance Act [pdf, en, 31kb]
- Netherlands – Youth Unemployment Task Force [pdf, en, 27kb]
Seminar presentations
- Mainstream policies for the Competitiveness and Employment Objective Regions (Peter Lloyd) [ppt, en, 585kb]
- The European Commission, local employment development and the IDELE programme: brief introduction (Dominic Rice, DG Employment, Social Affairs, and Equal Opportunities Unit D/2) [ppt, en, 182kb]
- The emergence and development of an Italian industrial district: the case of Prato (Gabi Dei Ottati, University of Florence and Polo University of Prato) [ppt, en, 43kb]
- I fondi Europei, le politiche attive del lavoro e l’approccio locale (Patrizia Paganini) [ppt, en, 44kb]
- Work and income in the Netherlands (Gerrit Jan Schep) [ppt, en, 1.39mb]
- Work First: the Dutch experience (Yvonne Bieshaar) [ppt, en, 644kb]
- Promoting active labour policies through networking in Lombardy (Lorenzo Bienati) [ppt, en, 1.11mb]
- Supporting local partnerships for inclusion and employment in the West Midlands (Richard Corfield, Government Office for the West Midlands) [ppt, en, 1.42mb]
- Working in Partnership in Shropshire (Joe Bubb, Shropshire County Council) [ppt, en, 1.95mb]
- Neighbourhood Renewal in UK (Sarfraz Shafiq, Worklessness and Economic Policy Team, Neighbourhood Renewal Unit) [ppt, en, 781kb]
- Clapham Park Project: A local development experiment (Sarah Lee) [ppt, en, 86kb]
- Objectif Plein Emploi, Luxembourg (Romain Biever and Romain Binsfeld) [ppt, en, 3.57mb]
- Perspective 50plus: Innovative tools for Local Employment Pacts: A German Federal Programme (Dieter Simon, Gesellschaft für soziale Unternehmensberatung) [ppt, en, 164kb]
