Compliance, gatekeeping o affermazione della sovranità nazionale? Risultati e limiti di Europa 2020 nella lotta alla povertà

Due to its peculiar combination of soft governance mechanisms with a hard quantitative
target, in the field of anti-poverty policy the EU’s overarching strategy Europe 2020 marked
relevant discontinuity vis à vis the Lisbon strategy and the Social OMC. It was, thus, initially
welcomed by the literature as a promising step towards stronger social Europe, but in the last
years several contributions have questioned the effectiveness of both the new strategy and
more generally the EU in combating poverty and social exclusion. Against this backdrop,
the article has two main goals. First, it asks whether and how Europe matters in the fight
against poverty and social exclusion within the novel Europe 2020 institutional framework,
by presenting a qualitative in-depth empirical investigation on the effects of the strategy
in six European countries: Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, UK and Sweden. Second,
taking stock of the heterogeneous findings in the six selected countries, the article shows
that domestic factors – namely, policy legacies, the relevance of EU social funds, as well as
partisan preferences – were key in either favoring or hindering the implementation of the
strategy at the national level in the first five annual cycles (2011-15). This allows drawing
some key considerations around the potentials and the very limits of EU’s anti-poverty
strategies under the current treaty framework.