Trajectories among recipients of social assistance in Norway: A local approach

Abstract

1 INTRODUCTION

A local perspective on individual work and welfare careers has become more urgent in the past decades due to recent political, economic and social developments (Heidenreich & Rice, 2016). In general, the Nordic welfare regime is more service oriented than other welfare regimes. To state the obvious, service provision and use take place at the local level. As Andreotti and Mingione (2016) have claimed: “The ‘new active welfare’ lays its foundations at the local level, …”. Recent work and welfare reforms have increasingly emphasized activation and integrated or coordinated provision of a multitude of services. This development also seems like a necessity as new target groups include more disadvantaged individuals farther from the labour market and who have more complex problems and hence need a variety of services.

Kazepov (2010) has asserted that ‘the territorial dimension of social policies has long been a neglected perspective in comparative social analysis’. Recent scientific contributions have met this challenge mostly by mapping variations in local welfare arrangements and by analysing sociopolitical drivers of decentralization of such welfare provisions (Andreotti et al., 2012; Heidenreich & Rice, 2016; Vampa, 2017).

The ambition of this paper is to bridge the gap between the local social policy/regime literature and scholarship on benefit users' dynamics and trajectories. It addresses the actual trajectories or pathways of social assistance recipients in domains like work, welfare and education. The aim is to investigate how these trajectories are related to characteristics of the municipality of residence in Norway. We ask: Net of labour market conditions and individual characteristics, to what extent are resources provided by the local municipality and particularly the local Labour- and Welfare office (NAV office), able to further work oriented trajectories among younger recipients of social assistance?

Young social assistance recipients are selected for scrutiny as they have several and varied disadvantages (van der Wel et al., 2006). Hence, many are hard-to-assist and need a variety of resources and services. In the public debate, many are worried that young recipients are entering their adulthood as “dependent” on social assistance. Young people (< 30 years of age) in general and social assistance recipients in particular are among the target groups of The Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV).