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This paper is concerned with the spatial and institutional conditions under which localized forms of social innovation can complement and strengthen existing institutionalized welfare programs and schemes. It aims to identify relevant concepts to analytically frame socially innovative policies within the changing institutional context of welfare state policies. In order to do so, we explore several complementary bodies of literature: the literature on welfare state models and welfare mix and the literature on multi-level governance and state rescaling. The paper starts with a brief account of the emergence, evolution and classification of the European welfare states and then goes on to problematize two aspects of contemporary thinking about the welfare state in its various forms, namely methodological nationalism and state-centrism. It does so by analysing the Europeanisation of social policy, the localization of the welfare state and the changing welfare mix. The main part of the paper addresses these two shortcomings. Methodological nationalism is addressed through the literature on state spatial restructuring and multi-level governance, while state-centrism is challenged by discussing the literature on welfare mix and by unpacking the concept of governance in its multiple dimensions. At the end of this part we list the main insights and concepts derived from the literature on state rescaling and multi-level governance that help to shed light on the relationship between local social innovation and the welfare state. In the conclusion to this paper, we connect all this to social innovation and explore how variations in territorial organisation, mode of governance and welfare regimes could correspond to variations in the openness to and capacity of social innovation.

This paper surveys the literature on localized socially innovative policies and actions aimed at overcoming poverty and social exclusion. The authors show how these local forms of social innovation emerged in the late 1970s against the backdrop of the crisis and transformation of the Western welfare state, the emergence of new social risks and the transition from the Fordist to the knowledge based economy. The paper aims to learn about new or older but as yet too often overlooked poverty and social exclusion dynamics from the locally embedded and collective responses to it by civil society associations, local state institutions and/or social entrepreneurs. The paper first develops a definition of social innovation as it applies to the fight against poverty and social exclusion. In a second part the authors put social innovation in its historical context by discussing three different strands of social innovation research and practice, namely: (1) social innovation as a critique of the territorial innovation model underlying the knowledge-based economy; (2) social innovation as a critique on the bureaucratic nature of the welfare state; and (3) socially innovative forms of neighbourhood development as a response to the urban crisis. The third section of the paper then zooms in on the process dimensions of social innovation for each of the three strands discussed in the second part. The authors propose the metaphor of ‘the elephant and the butterfly’ to think through the relationship between localized forms of socially innovative actions and initiatives on the one hand and the macro-level institutions of the welfare state and dialectical interplay between state institutions and civil society associations on the other. The paper concludes with a preliminary list of social needs, trends in poverty and the reconfiguration of welfare institutions and policies that are revealed by place-based socially innovative practices.

The transformation of the Brazilian state during the presidency of Lula (2003-2010) will be dealt with in historical perspective. First, the theoretical background will be elaborated: Theories based on Max Weber will be employed to highlight institutional factors, while approaches of political economy will introduce questions of societal power relations. Specifics of semi-peripheral statehood will be demonstrated by approaches inspired by dependency theory. On this basis, Brazilian historical legacies will be identified: slavery and patrimonialism in an externally dependent state, which was conservatively modernized in the wake of import substituting industrialization during the 20th century into a 'developmental state'. After a short liberal intermezzo during the 1990s, the Lula administration has readopted the developmentalist approach. In contrast to the 'developmental state' of the 20th century, stronger republican and socially inclusive tendencies prevail now.