The transformative role of the social investment welfare state towards sustainability. Criticisms and potentialities in fragile areas

The paper discusses criticisms and transformative capabilities of the role of social investment policies in fragile areas, as territories characterized by continuous losses in economics of flexibility, that is the uncommitted potentialities for change, learning, adaptation, preservation and evolution. It very briefly presents the social investment main features and developments in the transformation of European social policy, before discussing some criticisms regarding its current capability in dealing with social risks and social exclusion in such contexts. In particular, it addresses the issues of human capital, productivism and sustainability, arguing for the need to reflect upon its related assumptions and the opportunity to include a more context-based approach. For this purpose, the paper analyses two experiences of community organization through participatory action-research implemented in fragile urban and rural areas, as well as the reasons why such kinds of practices could play an important role in identifying and enhancing the transformative potentialities of social investment. In particular the latter could be strategically aimed at promoting more sustainable local economies by integrating universalistic/category-based policies with bottom-up context-based interventions, to deal with the rooted characteristics that partly cause the problems and partly are the source of the possible answers.