Socially-oriented npos and social enterprises as drivers of denationalization in social services: Barriers and opportunities

Abstract

The 'golden age' of the welfare state is already in the past, and both in theory and in practice, it is drifting towards increasingly complex and mixed models, and ultimately towards welfare pluralism. Social enterprises and socially oriented NPOs (SO NPOs) are providers of social services. They interact in the same field and compete for government subsidies or grants. In the article, using the example of social services for the elderly in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region, we answer the following questions: how does the state withdraw from the provision of social services? What are the barriers and opportunities of this process? Our interpretation of these changes relies on a classical approach to the analysis of intersectoral interactions in social policy. Materials used for analysis include: current regulatory legal acts; statistical data; officials' speeches; research publications; and materials from NPO sites. SO NPOs and social entrepreneurship play an important role in the withdrawal of the state from social services, which accelerated in 2015 after the adoption of the new Federal Law on Social Services. In practice, the government often creates organizational and financial barriers to NPOs in an effort to maintain its monopoly in social services. Crowdfunding and grants can be viewed as a starting tool for the development of NPO and social business projects. Endowment funds could increase sustainability, but not all, even large NGOs, manage to create them. Other barriers are low awareness and level of public confidence; poorly developed mechanisms for the sale of products and services. Withdrawal of the state from social services through the active involvement of SO NPOs and social enterprises opens up opportunities for them to effectively compensate for the imperfection of state services, increase self-sufficiency and the self-employment of the population. Non-governmental providers of social services are changing the very field of solving social problems, turning passive 'service recipients' into active agents.