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COPYRIGHT 2002 Southern Public Administration Education Foundation, Inc.
Abstract
Local social policy plays a decisive role in the process of welfare state restructuring and has not received adequate attention in the research field. Beneath the seemingly stable surface of national welfare states, local levels are developing new institutional arrangements and new combinations of policies. This paper analyzes these developments using the example of British and German education, youth and employment policies.
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1. Local Welfare Regimes and Flexible Patterns of Adaption
Welfare states face a structural dilemma when social policy does not succeed in fighting long-term exclusion from the labour market. Either they have continued high costs of paying income-support to a significant proportion of the population for prolonged periods, or they must sharply reduce these payments, probably with adverse consequences for social cohesion and disadvantages across generations (Pearson/Scherer, 1997: p.9, Mingione, 1996: p.12). In larger cities, this dilemma becomes particulary obvious. Current studies show that the development of cities have been characterized by social polarization and heteroganization, by social segregation and social exclusion (O'Loughlin/Friedrichs, 1996; Madanipour et al., 1998; Musterd 1998). These tendencies mark a clear break in the development and self-concept of Western welfare states and their cities.
Different local restructuring processes of the labour market and production structures are taking place which has been leading to flexibility, and fragmentation of occupational structures and income situations. All of this depends on the involvement in global, national or regional economic cycles (Sassen, 1996).
Social exclusion as a consequence of "new" social risks originates mostly along the lines of economic and social modernization processes, which are generally not accounted for in the underlying assumptions about "normality" of the welfare state arrangement (Mingione, 1996). For example, it taken for granted that there is a smooth, linear school-to-work-transition. Due to conditions of mass unemployment and requirements of flexible labour markets, however, this transition between school and work contains many risks and pitfalls.
Above all, disadvantaged young people are in danger of being social excluded (Brauns/ Gangl/ Scherer, 1999; Maguire/Maguire, 1997). In this way there is a real threat of social disintegration and the formation of an underclass (Macdonald, 1997).
This paper argues that beneath the surface of seemingly stable welfare regimes, one can observe new institutional arrangements on the local level that are directed towards exclusion risks. This applies particularly to approaches to combat youth unemployment. The formation of transition systems can be observed between education, youth and labour market policy, where the traditional response of the welfare state--income support--is clearly inadequate in meeting individual and social requirements. The main problem that people now face is that they will not be able to establish themselves in their respective occupations. (Pearson/Scherer, 1997: 7). Furthermore, confronted with the increasing inter- and intraregional differentiation of social life and production patterns, centralized social policy seems to be no longer capable of tackling the heterogenous socio-political problems. Centralized social policy tries increasingly to influence the forms and conditions of local cooperation and coordination processes by frame-setting, information and incentive programs. Indeed, the role of the state is shifting from that of a dominant actor toward that of a strategic "enabler" and coordinator of other actors in public policy processes.
The position of the local welfare state can be viewed on different levels, such as from the perspective of the relative autonomy model, the agency model or in the context of the interactive model (Stoker, 1991: p.6). In any respect, the local level has gained more political significance within welfare state restructuring (Hesse/Benz, 1990: p.234) in the following ways:
* As a framework providing benefits and personal services, local welfare state reacts to changing action requirements.
* As executive framework, its scope of action widens, because standardized goals of central state programs are no longer adequate for the increasingly differentiated social conditions of life and production.
* As a level of coordination and management, local policies have proved to be decisive because the numerous sectoral programs can no longer be coordinated fully by the state.
This paper is concerned with a problem-orientated approach focusing on the implementation conditions of effective transition systems between school and work. This research serves as a contrast to traditional analyses of local policy concentrating on the issue of local government's autonomy from higher levels of government. Instead, this paper deals with the issue of the localization of social policy and the role of the local welfare state in the process of welfare state restructuring (see Geddes/ Le Gales, 2001).
This article presents initial results of a comparative research project about inclusive urban policies for young people in Germany and the UK. The research project analyzes social policy reponses of education, youth and labour market policies to high youth unemployment and exclusion of young people.
The comparison of Germany and the UK is based on a "meta-perspective", which is based on the premise that potential approaches of effective transition systems can be seen mostly on the interfaces of education, youth and labour market policy on the local level. The comparison between Germany and the UK is particularly interesting because they belong to two most different types of European welfare states, including distinct conditions in the political framework of these examined policies.
Such conditions can be noted as:
* a centralized, respectively federalist state organization,
* the different distribution of education, youth and labour market policy responsibilities among different political levels,
* the relative weakness of British communal policy, which is under the ultra-vires principle and on the other hand the strong position in legal terms of German local authorities with their guarantee for self-government,
* the different institutional formation of vocational training which results from diverging conditions and orientations for action of the employers within Liberal Market Economies respectively Coordinated Market Economies (Soskice/Hancke, 1996; Estevez-Abe/ Iversen/ Soskice, 2001; Hall/ Soskice, 2001).
While workfare policies are central in the debate about adaptations of the welfare state to the conditions of post-industrial economies, efforts to optimize school-to-work transitions are a close second. However, these "new" transition systems need to be complementary to the traditional school-to-work transitions and incentive compatible, namely complementary to the coordinating capacities embedded in the existing political economy. "Because the institutional context of the British economy encourages the acquisition of general skills and militates against sectoral coordination, its government is likely to enhance skill levels more by expanding formal education than by trying to foster sectoral training schemes modeled on the German" (Hall/Soskice, 2001, pp. 46). Vice versa, in Germany coordination-orientated policies are more likely to be taken, which build on the traditional institutional frameworks of transition policies. In this respect, one can assume that there will still be a remaining divergence of transition policies, even if problems are similar. So far, the restructuring of traditional transition systems has in many cases only taken place on the programmatic level and have been implemented on a very selective basis. The concrete implementation and integration of the different fields of policies on the local level will only be accessible to a closer analysis in the future in the course of the research project, needing further local case studies.
2. Youth in Germany and the United Kingdom--Cutting the Cycle of Disadvantage?
The traditional life course of the individual is organized mainly by the aspect of employment. Employment is assigning each part of life a particular task and function and it links them with one another. The function of childhood and adolescence is to prepare the individual for the working life. But if the transition from adolescence to adulthood is becoming more and more precarious, because of mass unemployment and flexible employment markets, then this crisis of the wage-earning society will also become a crisis of the young (Munchmeier, 1999; Wyn/ Dyer, 2000). The change of social structures can be felt predominantly in those transitions between education and training system, from there to employment and finally also within employment, when changing from one job to another. Thus, there is an overlap in class, life-course and intergenerational risks of exclusion for the young (see Furlong/ Stalder /Azzopardi, 2000). In such a dynamic perspective, unemployment and social exclusion are the results of previous life conditions and decisions, of current coping strategies and of the changing requirements of flexible employment markets. In how far those exclusion risks culminate for young people, depends also on the form and the institutional linkages between educational, training systems and labour markets.
In general, the United Kingdom is counted among the liberal welfare states and Liberal Market Economies characterized by flexible, deregulated labour market and a (competitive) education and training system focusing on general rather than industry-specific skills. In contrast to this, Germany is perceived as a conservative-corporatistic welfare state where the labour market is more regulated and the education and training system provides high industry-specific and firm-specific skills (Hall/ Soskice, 2001: pp.21).
Similarly, the transitions between education and employment follow the rationales of these different welfare states. In Germany, two quarters of the young gain access to the labour market because of their professional qualification, but in Britain this access to the labour market is regulated by school leaving certificates. (Brauns/ Gangl/ Scherer, 1999). However, as there is no British equivalent to the German dual vocational and educational system, the young are threatened with higher risks of exclusion, because they are about to start their working lives and because of the high percentage of un- or semi-skilled employees.
As to the school-to-work transition, the following table points to the different patterns of transition systems in the two countries. While the percentage of young people who are both in education and employment is nearly identical, the part of the young who are solely in training, is much higher than in the UK. Vice versa, the amount of young people in the UK who have only employment and of those who are neither in education nor employment, is clearly higher than in Germany.
In Germany, an increasing number of young people remain in the education system, while in Great Britain the young enter the labour market at a very early stage. This pattern is not without its risks, as the higher percentage of those who are neither in education nor in employment shows. While there are 29% of the German 15-19 year-olds in the labour market, in Great Britain the figures for this age group amount to even 51%, but the rate...
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