About the baby and the bathwater: assessing the European Platform against Poverty

This Working Paper provides a qualitative assessment of one of Europe 2020’s flagship initiatives: the ‘European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion’ (EPAP). It begins with a description of the Platform’s emergence and its place in the EU’s social policy toolkit. It then critically assesses the (modest) strengths and (multiple) weaknesses of the Platform, four years into its implementation, by looking at four dimensions. First, the capacity of the EPAP to promote synergies between EU-level actors and processes (horizontal integration); secondly, its linkages with the other tools of ‘Social Europe’ (policy coherence); thirdly, EU and domestic stakeholder involvement; and fourthly, its capacity to link EU and national levels of governance (vertical integration). While the Platform has prompted some positive developments (e.g. broadened consultation, enhanced coordination within the Commission), its impact has been severely constrained. Crucially, the Platform is rather static and lacks the procedures to feed into the European Semester; in addition, it remains unclear how the EPAP is connected to the Social OMC and the Social Investment Package. Nevertheless, we argue that a transformed EPAP could provide strong added value for the EU’s toolbox in the fight against poverty: rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater, the mid-term review of the Europe 2020 Strategy should be used as a window of opportunity to revamp this tool. We propose three complementary scenarios for boosting, step by step, the effectiveness of the Platform: it could serve as a hub for discussing the social dimension of Europe 2020, as a bridge with the European Semester, and even as Social Europe’s ‘watchdog’.