Employment activation and sustainable communities
Fresh approaches to employment activation and sustainable communities: lessons for the competitiveness and employment regions
This theme 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. 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.
Of particular interest to this theme were 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 theme demonstrated 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.
The theme therefore addressed 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 this theme was how the Lisbon process and the transformation of the European social model in the Member States are being played out locally.
This seminar was held in Bologna on 27–28 April 2006.
