Governments face the challenge to enhance Social Economy under economic crisis and austerity policies contexts. Despite the large and institutionally well recognized social value-added of the Social Economy (SE), few evidences reveal that governments have deployed proactive policies towards it during last economic recession. This article analyses the Spanish case, a country where austerity policies have been deeply deployed and which has a strong SE sector. Building on the SE approach and using a mixed methodology, the study analyses the policies addressed to SE in two periods, before and during the crisis. As a novelty, it compares policy discourse with the policies implemented. Findings highlight a gap between discourse and policy deployed during the crisis and that Social Economy has not been prioritised in policy agenda.
Because this research aims to study public policies towards SE in contexts of austerity policies, the empirical methodology is mixed, qualitative and quantitative. The study is focused on cooperatives and social enterprises, sheltered and social TSO. These are the core of the Social Economy in Spain, as it is established in the scientific literature, in the Spanish SE Law 3/2011 and by CEPES and PTS, the two outstanding platforms that represent SE and TS in Spain. The period analyzed is 2008-2013 period, period of the severe and prolonged economic recession. The study focuses on national government level, despite regional governments have their own public policies towards Social Economy. The raison is that former studies revealed that most of these policies proceed from the national level. The quantitative data is gathered from various sources: official documents, data from statistic institutes and government bodies, specialized journals, legal texts, reports of the outstanding platforms and interviews addressed to policy makers and representatives of platforms.
Hypothesis is based on reflections prior to conducting this study, we established that a change had taken place in the political discourse that favored the Social Economy which materialized in legal texts, and the sector has been introduced into the policy agenda, mainly due to the socio-economic situation that has emerged with the crisis, in which the problems that free capitalist-type market operations entail have heightened. We assumed that the results with which the change in the political discourse to foster the Social Economy should have occurred have not actually materialized or have been modest. Thus political discourse is quite different to the really implemented policies that promote the sector.
The structure of the article is as following. Firstly the theoretical framework is presented. The Social Economy approach and the public policies towards this social sector are explained. The second section is the methodological one. Third section analyzes the Spanish case. It begins presenting the major features and problems during the Spanish economic downturn and the macro-figures of the Spanish SE. Then we analyze the policies deployed to enhance the Social Economy in Spain. We distinguish two periods, the measures set up prior to the economic recession and the ones activated during the crisis. We examine not only the budgetary evolution of the funds used to promote the Social Economy in recent years, but also the new legal measures adopted in the last years of the recession. These features are compared with the political discourses during this period.
6. Institutionalization, scaling up and public policies
