Territorial instruments to concretize citizen rights

Abstract

This paper analyses new organizational formulae for the provision of general interest services in the local dimension. It is based on experienced research/action attached to territorial development. Its perspective is geographical and juridical, as a manifestation of an interdisciplinary project logic for the control of territorial change on a large scale. After exposing an analysis on the Social European Model, the paper copes with different possibilities regarding organization and management of essential services to the citizens. The public system of social services is taken as example, because Spanish experience in social protection -even being a global reference- remains exposed to challenges regarding the conversion of the social services in civil rights, where regional and local administrations have a special role, in the current phase of contraction of the European social model. So the article pays attention to the territorial base: districts, commonwealths and, above all, consortia, whose juridical regulation has been deeply reformed in very recent times. The paper concludes with the presentation of two cases of active territorial cooperation, more or less focused on social assistance and framed in the approach of capabilities -one private and one public- both as representatives of two complementary models of application of the guidelines of the Europe 2020 Strategy.