Introduction

This contribution is about taking social investment seriously. It delineates the intellectual background conditions in politics and social policy analysis against which social investment ideas have encountered difficulties in being heard since the 1990s. The chapter then reviews the slow, contained but progressive, evolution of social investment ideas from the metaphoric notion of ‘social policy as a productive factor’ in the second half of the 1990s to the more fundamental paradigmatic rethink of welfare provision over the 2000s. The chapter concludes by considering how social investment reform can contribute to ‘inclusive growth’, as advocated today by practically all international organisations and think tanks in the global marketplace of economic ideas.

Social investment taken seriously

Over the past two decades, the notion of social investment has gained considerable traction in scholarly debates, especially with international think tanks. In domestic policy making arenas social investment precepts have also been taken increasingly taken seriously. However, it is fair to say that social investment has not assumed paradigmatic primacy in 21st century welfare provision, for reasons to be explored here.

At the level of the European Union (EU), the idea of social investment, building on the pioneering work of the Dutch Presidency of the EU in 1997 on ‘social policy as a productive factor’, became a foundation for the Lisbon Agenda, launched in 2000 with the ambition to turn Europe into the ‘most competitive and dynamic knowledgebased economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth and more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’ (European Council, 2000). The EU's more recent and most assertive endorsement of social investment is the Social Investment Package for Growth and Social Cohesion (henceforth SIP), launched by the European Commission in February 2013, urging EU member states to advance post-crisis welfare reform strategies that help ‘prepare’ individuals, families and societies to respond to the changing nature of social risks in advanced economies, by investing in human capabilities from early childhood through to old age, rather than pursuing policies that merely ‘repair’ social misfortune after moments of economic or personal crisis (European Commission, 2013a; 2013b).