Governance in the Making? Europe 2020 and the Fight against Poverty and Social Exclusion

The fight against poverty and social exclusion has long been a fundamental brick of the European social dimension though resting on “soft” processes of policy coordination (cf. Heidenreich and Zeitlin 2009). The launch of Europe 2020 strategy in 2010, including quantitative poverty targets and the European Platform Against Poverty and Social Exclusion (EPAP), was welcomed by the literature as a step forward (Marlier et al. 2011); however, recent contributions cast doubts on the effectiveness of the new strategy in combating poverty (Copeland and Daly 2012). The paper addresses this puzzle by focusing on the novel multilevel “arena” represented by the Europe 2020 Anti-poverty & social exclusion strategy and the European Semester. Relying on empirical evidences for the period 2010-2013 we suggest a nuanced view on the effectiveness of novel European anti-poverty tools, which show both weaknesses and strengths. On the one hand, the Europe 2020 social dimension suffers from ineffective design especially with respect to its integration with the Social OMC. On the other hand, within a still unfinished social governance architecture, a multilevel and highly visible anti-poverty arena is gradually emerging characterized by open stakeholder mobilization and political pressure at the supranational level as well as EU bodies’ innovative policy proposal aimed to achieve Europe 2020 poverty and social exclusion targets.