The Housing Dimension of Welfare Reform - the ICCR

(b) When evaluating the ‘success’ of social programmes targeting
persons or families who are excluded or marginalized out of a
combination of structural and personal factors, it is important
to recall that ‘success’ is a relative concept and term, just like
re-integration (following a prolonged period of social
exclusion) is a long-term process involving several steps. The
effect of specific forms of support, like housing, must thus be
assessed in relation to others forms of support, especially with
regard to work (and the re-integration into the labour market),
health and social contacts.
In the section that follows we formalise the above approach for the
purpose of transferability in other fields of social policy following the
open method of coordination.
4.1.3 Towards a standardisation and transferability of the EUROHOME-
IMPACT method
As we saw above, the open-method of coordination aims to provide a
framework for promoting intelligent ‘policy mimicking’ towards a
European social policy agenda. This approach has been tried out in the
field of fighting income poverty (the so-called National Action Plans for
Social Inclusion) as well as in the field of dealing with unemployment
(so-called National Action Plans for Employment). Both ‘national plan’
procedures have involved intensive information exchange among
Member States through the specification of common criteria and their
regular monitoring.
The EUROHOME-IMPACT project provides the basis for extending the
basis of such comparisons and information exchanges. How this should
be done is described below.
Identify the target area and specify its scope
The first and often most challenging task of evaluation exercises is
defining the target area and its scope. How a specific problem is dealt
with is, of course, influenced by how it is defined in the first place.
However, the challenge is only in part one of social construction but,
primarily, an analytical one.
Relevant in this respect is how wide or narrow the field of study,
monitoring or intervention is defined. The evaluation or benchmarking
exercise will follow different procedures depending on whether, say, the
target area is defined as ‘housing integration’ or as ‘fighting
homelessness’. In the former case, the target area is defined rather
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