Poverty Reduction in Europe: Social policy and innovation (ImPRovE)

The Centre for Social Policy (CSB) and the Centre on Inequality, Poverty, Social Exclusion and the City (OASES) at the University of Antwerp successfully proposed a research project funded under the 7th Framework Programme that will address key questions such as: how can social innovation complement, reinforce and modify macro level policies, and vice versa? How can the conditions be improved to move towards the Europe 2020 objectives? 
 
The European Social Observatory will work particularly on the question how the Europe 2020 strategy, the EU social agenda and cohesion policy can be brought closer together at EU, national and sub-national levels (i.e. the issue of mainstreaming social innovation under Europe's new Strategy). In that perspective, the OSE will assess to what extent the different EU instruments available for addressing poverty and social exclusion - Structural Funds, the Open Method of Coordination and the newly to be created European Platform against poverty - can mutually reinforce each other in the context of Europe 2020.

OSE researchers involved in this project: Ramón Peña-Casas and David Natali.