Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on a European Union Programme for Social Change and Innovation

Europe's societies are confronted with multiple challenges stemming from increased global competition, the fast pace of technological progress, demographic trends, and climate change. The recent economic and financial crisis, which hit all Member States and regions in the Union, has compounded the situation.

In the area of employment and social policy, the Union continues to face complex problems, such as:
– high unemployment rates, especially among the low-skilled, the young, older workers, migrants and people with disabilities;
– an increasingly fragmented labour market, in which more flexible work patterns and other challenges are emerging and which have an impact on job security and working conditions;
– a shrinking workforce and increasing pressure on social protection systems as a result of demographic change;
– difficulty in combining work and caring responsibilities and achieving a sustainable work-life balance, hampering personal and family development;
– an unacceptably high number of people living below the poverty line and in social exclusion.

The crisis also highlighted the close links and spill-over between EU-27 economies, especially in the euro area, whereby reforms or the lack of them - in one country - affect the performance of the others. This means that coordinated action at the Union level is more effective in addressing these challenges than individual actions of single Member States. To be cost-effective, reforms also need to be as far as possible based on evidence.

The involvement of policy-makers and other stakeholders in a collective learning process and in developing and testing new approaches is likely to lead to greater acceptance and ownership of, and commitment to the Europe 2020 strategy. In this context, social innovation, and in particular social experimentation, can be a powerful tool for shaping the reforms and policy adjustments needed to implement Europe 2020.

However, the development and dissemination of a social innovation approach on a larger scale in the Union is hampered by a number of factors, including:
– insufficient knowledge of the needs and capabilities of civil society organisations, social enterprises and social entrepreneurs and public sector organisations;
– fragmentation of efforts and resources, lack of transparency and visibility, limited financial support and insufficient technical skills of the kind that can help organisations to develop and deliver social innovations;
– low levels of involvements of citizens and business;
– poor diffusion, and little scale-up of good practices;
– poor methods of impact evaluation of actions and policies.

While tackling socio-economic problems is primarily the responsibility of the Member States and regions and decisions have to be taken closest to the citizen, the Union has a role to play in putting the need for specific reforms on the agenda, identifying barriers to change and ways of overcoming them, ensuring that existing Union level rules are complied with, stimulating sharing of good practice and mutual learning, and supporting social innovation and Europe-wide approaches.

EUR-Lex: COM(2011)609: Follow the progress of this document through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2011:609:FIN

European Commission: SEC(2011)1134: Ex-ante evaluation http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=SEC:2011:1134:FIN:EN:PDF

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