A Long Journey towards Citizenship: District Areas and Social Services in Goteborg

Abstract: The main purpose of the present research is to investigate the implemented decentralized model of administration in local areas of Goteborg City and its effects on local welfare, or what I associate with the concept of social citizenship. In 1990 in Goteborg City the social sector - together with some other sectors (i.e. school and leisure) – was split up in 21 administrative District Councils. At that time politicians said that the main purpose of the district reform was to enhance social services management and citizenship. Citizenship entails a combination of participation and rights. This study will investigate the ways the reform improved local welfare. More precisely, it may be said that this is a study focusing on social administration mainly concerning the development of collective action and improved administrative performances for the advancement of local welfare. In Italy, instead of dealing with the increase of the complexity in social field through public intervention, the social services reform enacted by the law 328/2000 paved the way to partly privatize the Italian welfare state. This meant a much more massive presence of private actors in the social field. On the contrary, as it will be seen the Swedish government kept private subjects away from the management of social services by giving them the possibility to perform in political and cultural activities. The methodological design for this study can be complicated, since the implementation process could be seen as a journey that in Sweden started since 1952 and it is still in progress. Thus, I had to limit my purpose mainly in three questions: (1) How did the new institutional frame of reference contribute to improve social citizenship? (2) How did the district reform affect social services with regard to the building process of the local welfare? (3) In which way is Goteborg’s model to strengthen social citizenship distinguished from the Italian one? Our data consists of ten semi-structured interviews conducted thanks to the availability of key persons working in the municipality as city or district managers and social workers. The result is a clearer understanding of the district reform and its mechanism of functioning. For instance, it was possible to register the improvement of citizenship rights fulfilment due to the new local welfare model characterized by the institutional proximity to citizens, integration of different public services and sectors, coordination through decision-making decentralisation.