Social Inclusion

The concept of social inclusion has increasingly been seen as a new paradigm informing public policy. Responding to the changing nature and role of the state, in particular, the constraints imposed upon it by the actions of international and transnational actors, social inclusion promotes the involvement of a broader range of actors, including civil society organizations as well as governments, in addressing the multifaceted nature of disadvantage. Extending the understanding of disadvantage beyond the simple redistribution of material resources, the concept of social inclusion focuses attention on the civil, political, and social spheres.

Although employed by a range of actors from civil society groups, organizations such as the European Union, and transnational bodies such as the World Bank, no single definition for the term exists, and the concept itself is highly contested. Social inclusion is often presented in opposition to social exclusion, with [Page 882]the relationship between the two being seen as a dialectical one. Furthermore, the concept of inclusion and its other, exclusion, is based upon a mechanistic understanding of human relations where people satisfying certain criteria are bounded as included and those who do not are considered outside this boundary and thus excluded.

Understanding what constitutes inclusion varies widely among users and in the academic literature. Inclusion is generally regarded as common membership, governed by a particular vision of the political good, thus producing cohesion. Several paradigms conceptualizing inclusion have been identified, each espousing a particular conception of what it is to be included. This has implications for the analytical methods each paradigm relies upon and the moral discourses associated with them. These paradigms are employed variously across actors, and often individual actors utilize multiple discourses emanating from several different paradigms. For example, in the case of the New Labour government in Great Britain, there is evidence that several different discourses about inclusion are employed at different times. For example, on one level inclusion is defined solely in terms of paid employment: Individuals can only be included in society if they participate in paid employment, and they are excluded from it if they do not participate. However, on another level, New Labour employs a multidimensional conception of inclusion whereby inclusion is achieved through participation in a variety of activities, not just employment.

Despite its portrayal as a concept able to consider both processes and outcomes and thus agency and structure, critics of the term contend that the concept obscures structural inequalities by focusing only on horizontal relationships between in and out rather than vertical delineations between up and down. Moreover, by portraying the relationship between inclusion and exclusion as binary, the concept is used to isolate the excluded and to ignore those doing the excluding. This consequence is particularly acute when analyzing the examples previously given—where inclusion is conceptualized only in terms of paid employment. In the discourses of both the European Union and New Labour, exclusion is conceived as a condition, not a process, and therefore not something that can be inflicted onto people. Thus, when such actors talk about inclusion it is not used to address the structural economic processes or agents that inhibit inclusion and so resorts to an agent-focused notion of exclusion, where it is individuals themselves that are responsible for their own exclusion.

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