Building Economic, Needs-Based and Environmental evaluation Frameworks for Inclusive Transformation of Social services in Europe

BENEFITS will develop a Holistic Appraisal Framework (HAF) to measure the social, economic and environmental value-added of social services.

HAF consists of a set of innovative research, technology and experimental solutions based on active citizen engagement to provide well-founded evidence on the social and economic returns of social services.

HAF will leverage existing innovative, “beyond GDP”, valuation methods, leveraging insights from economics, social, behavioral, and political sciences as well as citizens and policymakers.Upon this preparatory work, BENEFITS will set up a research and engagement plan to identity, measure and visualise the social, economic and environmental value-added of social services as well as the enabling, inhibiting and mitigating factors that will allow to scale-up the positive effects of social services while ensuring a prosperous, inclusive and just transition.

BENEFITS will consolidate these findings through setting up a) a Social Services Policy Observatory (SSPO), which will document, assess, evaluate and co-design policies across multilevel governance in the EU, and b) citizen’s assemblies, integrating participants from all backgrounds, to deliberate on proposed policies.

These two activities will also be facilitated through BENEFITS’ Visualisations Platform (VP), an innovative technological solution, which will collect, document and visualise data from various sources (i.e., social media, news outlets, web) on issues related to provision of social services, welfare and prosperity, providing citizens, stakeholders and policymakers the necessary information to promote change.

Through data and insights collected from the research, experiments, SSPO and VP, BENEFITS will build a Policy Evaluation Toolkit (EVAL-KIT) which will inform policy making, though co-designed recommendations, with the aim to promote the uptake and value scaling up of social services.