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Social cohesion is clearly at stake in Europe. A key to achieving it is striking the balance between equality and diversity by understanding it as a complex, multi-layered problématique, that needs to be tackled in terms of being able to ‘live together differently’. This paper asks about the contributions of a socially innovative initiative in the field of intercultural education in Austria, the Vielfalter, to social cohesion. In particular, the article scrutinises the Vielfalter’s approach to ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’, quasi-concepts that have become buzzwords in social innovation.

The chapter disentangles the interplay of diversity and equality in Europe from a historical perspective and based on in depth-analysis of case studies in the field of education, intercultural learning and labour market activation. It identifies cultural hierarchies as key causes of poverty, especially in the case of Roma population and migrants. European anti-discrimination policies show the potential and limits of initiatives to combat poverty. The focus on language and communicative skills and the political imperative to stress civic integration results in individualising and culturalizing diversity. Funding restrictions tend to restrict policies that aim at reducing equality to fostering the equal access to the labour market by means of activation policies. These specific reductionist understandings of culturalist and socio-economic approaches are identified as key hindrances for effective policies to combat poverty in its multidimensionality.

In this chapter, we undertake a systematic analysis of the empowerment dimension of social innovation initiatives. The notions of social innovation and empowerment have a rather similar history. We provide a brief historical overview of the concept of empowerment and the diverse and competing meanings the concept has acquired over time. We then specify three dimensions of empowerment to analyse the empowering potential of social innovation: the bottom-up and top-down dynamics of empowerment, the relation between individual and collective forms of empowerment and the extent to which empowerment has an instrumental or expressive focus. In the analysed case studies of social innovation initiatives, we observe a pre-eminence of top-down empowerment, the dominance of individual empowerment dynamics and a predominant focus on instrumental forms of empowerment in social innovation initiatives, especially in the governance of labour market activation.

The chapter investigates two ideal types of knowledge about and for social innovations combating poverty: A model of linear change based on standardized knowledge and a context-sensitive model based on tacit knowledge for transformative alternatives. Case study analysis focussed on the field of homelessness and re-use. Six housing first initiatives in six European cities and two large networks of work integration social enterprises in UK and Flanders were studied to disentangle the dualist model by exploring how and why practitioners use different types of knowledge to pursue their respective mission. While codification and standardisation pushes for standardized knowledge, contextual knowledge is important for successful implementation. In all cases, the respective governance of producing and disseminating knowledge was decisive for effective agency. Knowledge alliances based on multi-level collaborations between stakeholders with different perspectives and forms of expertise were identified as promising forms of producing and disseminating knowledge to upscale and to diffuse socially innovative initiatives and approaches.

Over the last years, affordable housing has become less accessible in Vienna and homelessness has remained a problem. This paper describes Housing First - a socially innovative initiative - and investigates how social innovations can complement or progressively modify the governance structures of the welfare state in order to better combat homelessness. The in-depth analysis scrutinizes the socially innovative potential of a pilot project on Housing First in Vienna, with regard to service delivery for the homeless and the respective governance structure. The specific governance system is characterized by a strong role of the municipal government as financing institution and regulator. The pilot project, however, has contributed to changing the governance system, leading to more deliberation of service providers and an incipient knowledge alliance for social innovation in this field. This has the potential to implement evidence-based policy-making as well as fostering social cohesion by striking the balance between equal access to housing for all and awareness of divergent needs of a socioculturally diverse Population.

Be it the increase in poverty and unemployment, ‘Brexit’, or the current refugee tragedy – there is clear evidence that social and territorial cohesion is at stake in Europe. Historically, struggles for social cohesion were intended to repair the damages done by capitalist modernisation, such as the dissolution of traditional communities or widening class cleavages. Since the 1990s, social cohesion became a key European policy concern. While in line with the Lisbon Agenda the term has been de-politicised and framed as functional to competitiveness (Maloutas et al., 2008, p. 260), social cohesion has to be understood as the contradictory and contested quasi concept with different definitions in different policy fields (Jenson, 1998). From a socioeconomic perspective, it deals with the exclusionary dynamics of social inequality and poverty. While equality was never achieved in centralised welfare regimes, there has been a uniformisation in the access to social services and infrastructure which was often not very attentive to diversity. From a political perspective, social cohesion includes participation, representation and mobilisation, questioning an understanding of citizenship based on nationality. From a culturalist perspective, some stress the right to difference as well as recognition, dignity and belonging, while others focus on essentialist identity-building based on ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’.