Contemporary European Welfare State Transformations and the Risk of Erosion of Social Rights: A Normative Analysis of the Social Investment Approach

Abstract

Over the last decades, there has been a huge debate on the transformations of the European Welfare State. The issue of its financial sustainability together with the emergence of new social risks has put under pressure the traditional model of social protection and created the conditions for a change in the gist of the welfare state provisions. In this context, the social investment approach has become an emerging reference paradigm to tackle new social risks and meet the need to recalibrate the European welfare state and ensure its economic sustainability. However, despite this success, social investment still seems to be a rather ambiguous concept, too vague to result in precise and univocal policy prescriptions and open to the risk of a stretch of its interpretation by neoliberal politics, to erode social rights. In this paper we propose a theoretical framework to better clarify the normative ground, the moral foundation and political justification of the social investment approach and to understand whether it can avoid the risk of the erosion of social rights.