Report on Scenario Development Workshop

Abstract

The Scenario Development Workshop represents a key step within the broader architecture of the SWINS project, supporting the development of a coherent analytical framework for the ex-ante assessment of investment in social policies and services. More specifically, the workshop contributed to establishing a shared conceptual and methodological basis for constructing policy-relevant scenarios, which will be put into practice in the project's empirical work. The overall objective of SWINS is to elaborate an effective framework for measuring the economic, social and environmental returns generated by investments in social policies and services. In doing so, the project addresses a number of interconnected methodological and analytical challenges. On the one hand, social investments may produce heterogeneous forms of returns, ranging from income and employment outcomes to broader dimensions such as sustainability, inequality reduction and wellbeing. On the other hand, these effects emerge through complex interactions between macro-level institutional changes and micro-level behavioural responses (Ciani & Fattacciu, 2025). The analytical perspective adopted in SWINS is grounded in the Social Investment approach (Hemerijck, Ronchi, & Plavgo, 2022). According to this approach, providing social policies and services can generate changes in individuals’ opportunity structures and behaviours. The aggregate effects of these changes may improve social and economic outcomes and the long-term sustainability and effectiveness of welfare systems. This requires the development of an integrated analytical architecture that can link macro-level transformations and micro-level outcomes, as well as the feedback mechanisms between these two dimensions (Ciani & Fattacciu, 2025). Within this framework, the Scenario Development Workshop pursued three main objectives. First, it aimed to identify a set of coherent and policy-relevant scenarios concerning investment in social policies and services. Second, it sought to provide an operational basis for the microsimulation exercises carried out in WP6. Third,it will inform the development of the Macro Agent-Based Model in WP7. The Scenario Development Workshop took place in Antwerp on 7 and 8 May. Twenty participants spent two days taking part in various discussions about developing scenarios for various services. First, the contextual and structural variables that define the broader socio-economic environment in which policies operate were discussed. These variables can significantly affect the outcomes of policy interventions. The focus then shifted to four key social services: labour market policies, early childhood education and care, education and healthcare. For each of these services, policy variables directly related to the design and configuration of policy instruments were considered. These include parameters such as the level and generosity of benefits, coverage, eligibility criteria and different forms of conditionality, as well as the policy levers specifically identified in the task descriptions. In order to guide the discussion and support the identification of plausible and analytically tractable scenarios, the workshop revolved around a set of key questions aimed at clarifying which dimensions should be prioritised in scenario construction, how they can be operationalised within the project’s modelling framework and how the different analytical components of the project can be effectively integrated. The participants of the workshop were mainly consortium partners of the SWINS project: researchers from PIN Foundation, University of Belgrade, TARKI Social Research Institute, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Social Platform, ZOE Institute, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Oslo Metropolitan University and University of Antwerp. Furthermore, some relevant stakeholders also participated in the Scenario DevelopmentWorkshop: participants from Social Services Europe, the European Social Observatory and the Joint Research Centre Seville were present