Social Inclusion

Between the 1990´s and the beginning of the 21st century, the notion of social inclusion became widely known as one of the central objectives of public policies, both in Europe and Latin America. Over the past few decades, social inclusion has become an imperative for many social policies. At the same time, it is stressed that it also institutes processes and ways of organizing work in the institutions involved to achieve this objective.

The origins of social inclusion

The discussion about social inclusion and exclusion took place in the French sociology of the 1970s: the social problems experienced in Europe were studied from the perspective of social fragility and vulnerability. The first reference to it is the work entitled “The Excluded. One French in ten”, by Lenoir (1974), who coined the term 'excluded' in relation to people with disabilities or mental disorders, drug addicts, orphans, even the elderly and single-parent families; in short, all those who were excluded from economic progress (Castel, 1997; Mascareño y Carvajal, 2015). As a consequence, the controversy about unidimensional concept of poverty turned out to be exclusively measure in income, because it hides the diversity of social problems. As a result, the notion of social exclusion was postulated as a multidimensional concept, which conceives new problems in terms of deprivation. In short, once the issue of social exclusion has been installed in the public agenda with a negative connotation, social inclusion was included as one of the objectives of the formulation of public policies representing, by contrast, an ideology with positive impression (Atkinson, 2004).

Some definitions Social inclusion reached greater prominence but without specific theoretical precision or a definitive definition. Some of the definitions refer to a high degree of generalization and characterize it in their theoretical aspect. First, Lo Vuolo (1995: p 15) asserts: "inclusion means that the entire population in the system of social institutions, concerns both access to their benefits and their mechanism of dependence”. On the other hand, Ocampo (2004: p. 37) says that social inclusion is associated with the "emphasis on how to more equitably distribute the benefits of economic development, social interaction networks and political participation". Finally, Oxoby (2009: p. 7) considers that “Inclusion is an aspect of how one perceives her access to institutions and resources in the decision making environment. As such, inclusion affects the way individuals perceive the returns of investing in various forms of capital”.

A multidimensional notion

The social inclusion perspective finds support in Sen's capacity scheme (2000), for which the wealth measured in income is not desirable by itself, but by the set of capacities that allow people to expand opportunities that individuals have. From this theoretical framework, social inclusion helps to promote human capacities in their multiple dimensions (Calderon, 2007) and state interventions can be interpreted as eliminating deprivation of capacities in various dimensions of social order.

References

Atkinson, T. (2004). La experiencia de la Unión Europea con la política de inclusión social. En M. Buvinić, J. Mazza, J. Pungiluppi, R. Deutsch (eds.), Inclusión social y desarrollo económico en América Latina (pp. 111-142). Washington D.C.: Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. Calderón, F (2007). Ciudadanía y desarrollo humano. En F. Calderón (ed.), Ciudadanía y desarrollo humano. Castel, R. (1997). La metamorfosis de la cuestión social. Una crónica del salariado. Buenos Aires: Paidós. Lenoir, R (1974). Les exclus: Un Français sur dix. Paris: Seuil. Lo Vuolo, R. (1995). A modo de presentación: los contenidos de la propuesta de ingreso ciu-dadano. En Centro interdisciplinario para el Estudio de Políticas Públicas (ed.), Contra la exclusión. La propuesta del ingreso ciudadano (pp. 13-46). Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila Editores. Mascareño, A., Carvajal, F. (2015). Los distintos rostros de la inclusión y la exclusión. Revista Cepal 116, 131-146. Ocampo, J. (2004). Desarrollo económico e inclusión social. En M. Buvinić, J. Mazza, J. Pungiluppi, R. Deutsch (eds.), Inclusión social y desarrollo económico en América Latina (pp. 37-46). Washington D.C.: Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. Oxoby, R. (2009). Understanding Social Inclusion, Social Cohesion and Social Capital. Laurier Centre For Economic Research & Policy Analysis. Economic Research Paper 09. Sen, A. (2000). Desarrollo y libertad. Barcelona: Planeta.