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Abstract:

At the beginning of this new decade, almost every European country faces the tremendous challenge to reform its welfare state. Policy makers face the combined challenge to balance budgets in this post-crisis era in a context of ever increasing needs for social care. While co-operatives contributed importantly to the early development of the Belgian welfare state at the beginning of the 20th century, associations have become the dominant organisational form within Belgian social care. Co-operatives, however, have been rediscovered very recently by Belgian policy makers as an innovative organisational form that might allow to meet both challenges described above. Introducing co-operatives within Belgian social care, may accelerate the development of infrastructure and foster the provision of care for the elderly, childcare and care for people with disabilities. While co-operatives allow to mobilise people and means in a potentially democratic way, opponents to this introduction raise some pertinent questions. These questions include how to prevent mission drift and how to ensure the achievement of genuine social objectives instead of mere mutual objectives, rendering the position of the weaker in society at risk. In this paper, we start with a brief overview of recent initiatives that introduce co-operatives within the field of social care in Belgium. Next, we apply a law and economics approach to assess the safeguards that can be distilled from the Belgian legal and administrative system in order to ensure the achievement of social objectives for co-operatives in social care. Subsequently, we make an evaluation of the organisational comparative advantages of co-operatives, associations and for-profit organisations within social care. While this analysis is based upon theoretical insights from different fields within law and economics, it may as well explain the relative propensity of these organisational forms throughout time and space. Finally, we conclude with policy recommendations in order to achieve a sustainable design of conditions upon which co-operatives should be allow to enter the field of social care.