ACES is proud to sponsor a Book Launch Seminar to discuss the new book Governing the Welfare Commons: On Europe’s Social Investment Turn, edited by Anton Hemerijck and David Bokhorst. Hemerijck and Bokhorst will introduce the book and its key messages, followed by comments from Prof. Dr. Femke Roosma. Prof. Brian Burgoon will chair the discussion. The book launch seminar will be followed by drinks. All are welcome!

Social investment

The book argues that social investment allows policymakers to combine inclusive welfare provision with competitiveness and fiscal sustainability. It traces reform sequences across ten country case studies and the European Union to understand whether countries are also moving towards social investment, arguing that a discernible yet non-linear shift has occurred over time. 

To explain the shift in welfare policies, the book invokes the notion of the welfare commons as a responsibilising policy feedback force on politicians seeking inter - and intragenerational fairness in times of demographic ageing.  

About the speakers

Anton Hemerijck is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at European University Institute. Trained as an economist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, he took his doctorate from Oxford University. In his capacity of Dean of the Faculty of the Social Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, together with Jonathan Zeitlin, he founded with the University of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Centre for Contemporary European Studies (ACCESS EUROPE). He also directed the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), the principle think tank in the Netherlands, while holding a professorship in Comparative European Social Policy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. 

David Bokhorst is a political scientist with a broad interest in European and Dutch socioeconomic policies. Policy advisor at the Socio-Economic Council in the Netherlands, academic at the European University Institute in Florence.