Introduction

In the context of successive financial crises and diminishing welfare provision offered by European governments, new demands and market conditions open new opportunities for profit as well as non-profit providers of social services targeted at socially excluded people. This chapter provides an analysis of faith-based organisations (FBOs) and their relationship to central–local government and related changes in welfare provision aimed at combating social exclusion in the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. The central questions addressed are:

• • Why are FBOs of interest in times when financial and economic crises trigger governments at all levels to reconsider their responsibilities as providers and protectors of social welfare?

• • How do FBOs in different welfare regimes operate at the local level in the context of welfare retrenchment and/or redesign?

• • What are their (faith-motivated) interests and strategies?

• • Are FBOs in a process of replacing public authorities as welfare providers, or are they, at best, capable and willing to give complementary support at the margin?

A substantial part of the current forms and practices of FBOs in Europe, especially the Christian ones, have a long history, mostly pre-dating the welfare state. Thus, to understand the current manifestations of FBO practices in different countries we also need to be aware of their historical roots and successive developments, thus following the methodological line of thinking stated by Romanillos, Beaumont and Sen in Chapter Two of this volume, that is, that state–religion relations should be grasped in ‘their historical and geographical specificity.’ The Swedish case was partly chosen because it is a country where local government has an outstanding tradition and position in terms of welfare provision, and partly because it is dominated by a longstanding Lutheran state church. In contrast, Spain has a Catholic heritage, and postwar development, where local government, after formal democratisation (1978) co-administers, or has gradually taken over, social responsibilities from FBOs and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The Netherlands, finally, is a hybrid between a social democratic and a liberal welfare state (in the language of Esping-Andersen), with a reformist tradition of quite extensive involvement by Protestant (Calvinist) and Catholic FBOs as well as other NGOs in social affairs, where central government has increasingly downloaded responsibilities to local governments while retaining fiscal centralism, and where the developments also ‘have a clear leitmotif of a shift from collective to individual responsibility’ (van Oorschot, 2009, p 365).