Faculty of Economic, Social and Political Sciences and Communication (ESPO) and the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Work, State and Society (CIRTES) within the IACCHOS Institute

Research conducted in collaboration with CeSO Centre for Sociological Research and ReSPOND Research Institute for Social Policy and Family Dynamics at KU Leuven.

Challenges

The Public Social Welfare Centres (CPAS/OCMW) guarantee people’s right to benefits in Belgium. As such, they are responsible for ensuring that people who receive these benefits can live in dignity by offering them various types of financial and social support. The federal government has made the REDI (minimum income needed to live in dignity) software available to the centres in the country’s three regions (Brussels-Capital Region, Wallonia and Flanders) in exchange for a two-year subsidy. On the technical level, REDI is an expert system based on symbolic AI. It measures the actual financial needs of people and households that receive benefits based on their individual circumstances. The roll-out of this tool in public social welfare centres is part of the more sweeping digitalisation of social services. These changes aims to simplify the payment of benefits by automating the allocation process while reducing the administrative burden for social workers. The main challenge consisted of identifying the institutional, organisational and practical conditions under which the use of this software can effectively facilitate the work of social workers who work directly with recipients of benefits and line managers. More specifically, the objective was to explore the extent to which and how the software’s use is reshaping (or not) the allocation of these benefits and the support provided by social workers to benefits claimants.

UCLouvain’s contribution

Martin Wagener, a sociologist specialising in labour and social policy, has long been interested in the conditions under which social policies are implemented. The digital transition is one of the key variables in understanding the transformation of social protection, employment and work in the social services sector. Périne Brotcorne, a sociologist and researcher at CIRTES and a guest professor at the FOPES (Open Faculty of Social and Economic Policy) and the Louvain School of Political and Social Sciences (PSAD/ESPO) specialises in issues relating to the effects of widespread use of digital tools in public services. This research provided an opportunity to combine the two areas of expertise and examine the repercussions of the widespread use of these tools in the state’s social welfare administrations on various aspects of civil servants’ work. On the whole, the results highlight the ambivalent effects of the widespread use of REDI in a context of double uncertainty: firstly on the financial level [structural lack of funding, uncertainty about the share of the financial burden to be borne by public social welfare centres], and secondly in terms of the objectives of this project [fear of loss of autonomy and standardisation of professional practices, fear of increased control of civil servants and activation of benefits claimants]. The results reveal that a lack of clarity regarding the objectives and implications of the widespread use of this software leads professionals to view it as something arbitrary with no real social added value that is imposed from above, generating administrative constraints that are considered meaningless because they are not understood or negotiated at the local level. They thus highlight how crucial the legitimation of technological changes is by the people working in the field in order to foster buy-in for projects and ensure that they are implemented effectively.