Work and the Welfare State: Street-Level Organizations and Workfare Politics

Chapter 6 Triple Activation: Introducing Welfare-to-Work into Dutch Social Assistance

6 Triple Activation Introducing Welfare-to-Work into Dutch Social Assistance Rik Van Berkel T his chapter argues that the introduction of welfare-to-work reforms in welfare states—‘‘activation,’ as it is usually called in Europe—in practice involves a process of ‘‘triple activation.’’ This means activating beneficiaries of social assistance, the organizations that administer benefit payments and activation services, and frontline staff in these organizations.1 Through the processes of triple activation, welfare states redefine the rights, obligations, and responsibilities of the unemployed, transform the core business of public welfare and employment agencies, and reshape the practices of frontline workers. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the Dutch government initiated a series of reforms designed to transform social assistance from a program of income support to one emphasizing labor market participation. In this chapter I analyze this transformation to a policy regime of work activation from a triple-activation perspective. This perspective directs attention to three key dimensions of the reform process . The first is formal policy reform. Legislative provisions are usually the focus of study in European policy research, which primarily examines social policies at the national level. This becomes problematic when reforms involve decentralization and devolution to subunits of government. Under these circumstances, policy decisions involve complex configurations of national, regional, and local actors. Thus, one must be careful about treating social policies simply as national policies (Van Berkel, De Graaf, and Sirovátka 2011). Governance is a second dimension of the reform process. Here the analytical focus is on the principles that structure interactions between levels of government and reach down to the street-level organizations (SLOs) that implement 87 88 rik van berkel policy (Kooiman and Bavinck 2005). Governance reforms may involve decentralization and devolution and the introduction of new public management (NPM) strategies, such as quasi markets for service provision (Considine 2001), contracting (Sol and Westerveld 2005; Bredgaard and Larsen 2007), and performance measurement (see chaps. 1, 2, 6, 8, and 9 in this volume). (In addition, reforms may involve consolidation or integration of implementing agencies [Van Berkel, De Graaf, and Sirovátka 2011].) A third dimension of reform involves the organization of activation policy in street-level work. It examines the organizations and direct service staff that are, in effect, the actual ‘‘agents of the welfare state’’ (Jewell 2007). It is through the interactions between staff and beneficiaries that the practices of SLOs ultimately come to embody the modern objectives of the activating welfare state (see chaps. 1 and 2 in this volume and also Brodkin 2007; Meyers, Glaser, and MacDonald 1998; Lurie 2006). In Europe, there is limited research into the organizational dimensions of reform.2 This chapter, like others in this volume, seeks to address this research gap, in this case using the concept of triple activation to examine Dutch activation reforms. In this chapter I elaborate on a theme introduced by Michael Lipsky; namely, that SLBs ‘‘hold the keys to a dimension of citizenship’’ (Lipsky 1980b, 4). I argue that this becomes increasingly important with the introduction of activation policies that give a more significant role to frontline workers as de facto policymakers. Activation policies may affect street-level work in different ways. First, reforms that primarily involve relatively straightforward changes in income-transfer rules—for example, by altering eligibility or by reducing bene- fits—are likely to require relatively minor changes in street-level work. Second, more significant changes are at stake when activation policies require caseworkers to scrutinize, monitor, and evaluate the behavior of benefit recipients and to make moral judgments concerning their ‘‘deservingness’’ (Hasenfeld 2000; also see chaps. 11 and 12 in this volume). Third, the nature of frontline work depends on specific features of policy and governance. For example, when activation programs are uniform, standardized, and targeted at clearly defined groups, casework may be more administrative in nature than when the emphasis is on individualized assessments and tailor-made service provision (Jewell 2007; Brodkin 2009). Governance reforms may significantly impact street-level work when they increase discretion, relocate it to private providers through contracting , or alter the conditions of work through performance measurement (Larsen and Van Berkel 2009b). To speak simply of ‘‘activation policy’’ without recognizing its organizational dimensions may obscure these important structural variations and their implications for how activation takes shape in practice. This chapter presents a study of triple activation in the case of Dutch social assistance reforms. It begins by briefly...