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Families Facing the Crisis: Is Social Investment a Sustainable Social Policy Strategy?

Since the end of the 1990s, the social investment approach has become a new paradigm in academic and political discourse on social policymaking, above all at the European level. As the social investment approach to social policy aims at tackling the most vulnerable social groups by offering educational programs, supporting the access to employment, especially for young adults and women, and putting an end to the intergenerational transfer of poverty, it appears promising as a new overarching social policy strategy. It is, however—conceptually and in practice— hardly connected to the traditional logic of social provision, which is to compensate for individual incapacity to work or market failure. We claim that the social investment approach falls short of providing arguments for decent and sustainable social protection for the whole population, and that an implementation of this strategy as it is formulated will rather increase than reduce overall social inequality. Trade-offs between the new social investment strategy and traditional redistributive social policy objectives become particularly clear in the analysis of family policy. Our analysis identifies such basic trade-offs between the social investment approach and more “traditional” family policies. We argue that the EU member states will adopt a pragmatic, selective or comprehensive approach to social investment according to their basic welfare-type pattern. The comparative analysis of changes in family policies since the outbreak of the crisis (from 2008 to mid-2012) in six European countries provides the empirical basis for our argument.