Just services? The impact of SGI development on socio-spatial conditions

Abstract

The concepts of social and spatial justice designate how social inequalities are to be managed in ways that provide equal opportunities to all members of societies. A crucial aspect of social and spatial justice concerns the ways services are provided: how different types of services are delivered to ensure fairness regarding their availability, accessibility, affordability or even quality. The principles of delivering services of general interest (SGI) are rooted in a European model of society which seeks to provide equal opportunities, social welfare, solidarity and cohesion. These concepts also build on central aspects of social and spatial justice.

The RELOCAL Horizon 2020 research aimed at analyzing how spatial justice is locallyde"ned and pursued in local development actions and their connection to EU development policies.The understanding of RELOCAL project on spatial justice emphasizes both the distributive side of justice - which can be understood as the just distribution of resources and opportunities between social groups across space -, and the procedural element of it - which is related more to power mechanisms causing injustice between various social groups and spaces. Case studies, composing the core of the research, analyzed development initiatives that were based on locally defined social needs. Case studies addressed the development of services of general interest indirectly by focusing on infrastructure networks and social services. This paper analyzes the empirical findings of six case studies from East-Central Europe of the RELOCAL project that explicitly focused on local development initiatives related to services of general interest. The analysis links principles of services of general interest and follows the comparative logic of the RELOCAL project by exploring similarities of cases and referring to the most important differences.

Case study findings show that local challenges related to the provision of services of general interest could only be addressed moderately (e.g. the improvement of living conditions). Overall, development programmes aiming at local SGI can often lead to the reproduction of social and spatial injustices and hierarchical dependencies due to procedural and distributive deficiencies. In these processes the role and responsibility of actors from different spatial levels and their power relations are essential, since they make linkages between agreed and desired principles and the actual implementation.