Governing Activation in Ireland (GAII) seeks to understand how different modes of commissioning public employment services (PES)—whether PES are delivered by private, public or community organisations, and on the basis of Payment-by-Results or fees for services—affect the labour market reintegration of long-term unemployed citizens, and the employment support they receive.
The context for the project are the major changes in social welfare in Ireland since 2011, which have unfolded across two tracks. The first is the ‘activation turn’ towards a more conditional (workfarist) approach to welfare through benefit cuts, tighter eligibillity conditions, and new sanctions for claimants who breach work-related obligations. The second is the major institutional reforms accompaning these changes.
Until 2011, Ireland operated a ‘two-tiered’ PES system. Some PES were provided by the state and others such as Local Employment Services (LES) for the long-term unemployed were delivered under contract by not-for-profit organisations. Ireland’s PES system has now evolved into a ‘three-tiered’ system comprising a mix of public, private, and community-delivered PES. This followed the introduction of JobPath, an employment service for the long-term unemployed that is delivered by private firms on a Payment-by-Results basis.
Irelands ‘mixed economy’ of activation is particularly interesting from a comparative governance perspective due to the degree of overlap between JobPath and LES. Both are contracted by the same department, operate under the same policy settings, and are targeted at the same cohorts. What differentiates them is their governance modes: JobPath is steered through market governance whereas LES are commissioned through annual, fee-for-service contracts without tendering. This afforded a rare opportunity to examine how marketisation reshapes PES delivery, which GAII exploited to provide a comparative assessment of the market governance of activation focused on four questions:
1. The influence of the commissioning model on the service delivery models of contracted PES and case management approaches of their staff?
2. Whether different governance frameworks result in qualitatively different activation services?
3. The extent to which the Irish experience of PES marketisation has converged with that of other liberal welfare states?
4. How jobseekers experience the ‘market governance’ of activation?
The project advanced understanding of the intersection between the policy turn towards activation and the governance turn towards marketisation, with GAII finding several differences between how activation is enacted between the marketised and non-marketised components of Ireland’s mixed-economy. Frontline delivery under JobPath was characterised by a significantly stronger emphasis on job-search monitoring, ‘work first’ rather than training, and reporting jobseekers for non-compliance. Conversely, LES staff placed a greater emphasis on supporting clients into education or work experience with less evidence that they monitored job-search instensity or used sanctions. While GAII finds PES in Ireland are less workfarist than other liberal regimes, marketisation precipitated a decided turn towards a more demanding, workfare model in practice. It also brought substantive changes in the PES workforce including the de-skilling and tighter performance management of frontline staff, which reshaped their uses of discretion.
