Fostering Resilience Via Almps: The Case of the Youth Guarantee Scheme

This contribution investigates the potential of delivering resilience of a recent European initiative, the Youth Guarantee (YG), aimed at improving young people’s labor market outcomes resulting from the current socio-economic context. Resilience can be defined as an unexpected positive outcome in a context of high adversity (Bartley 2006), and was originally associated with mental and physical health, but has since been adopted in a wide range of fields (e.g. labor economics (OECD 2012), ecological studies (Berkes, Folke and Colding 2000)). In times of high unemployment, labor market institutions such as activation policies can contribute to better labor market outcomes of (young) jobless (OECD 2012). The YG, launched in 2013, aims to secure paths towards youth employment by providing timing activation, (vocational) training and education (European Commission 2012). Yet resilience and policy tools to achieve it are likely to be conceptualized differently in diverse institutional contexts. Based on relevant features of YG, the contribution explores how resilience is conceptualized in the European proposal and which policy tools EU member states are expected to adopt. The diversity of implementation and choice of tools across EU countries is examined. Based on a selected number of countries representing different transition regimes (Walther 2006), I analyze how resilience is cognitively conceived, i.e. how resilient young people are defined, and what typologies of ALMPs are preferred (Bonoli 2010). I expect EU countries to reshape the EU guidelines and adopt national YG which are, both in cognitive and policy tools, in line with national transition regimes.