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SOCIAL CARE THEMATIC BUDGET 1.
Social Care Thematic Budget
The Social Care Thematic Budget is an initiative of Wijkbelangen Emmerhout (http://www.emmerhoutspringlevend.nl/welkom). This is a local Community Group from the municipality of Emmen in the Dutch province of Drenthe. This initiative was developed with the support of Movisie1 (www.movisie.com), the Dutch Institute for Social Work and of LSABewoners/LSA, the Dutch National residents platform (http://www.lsabewoners.nl/en/). It is intended to monitor the budget for Social Care policies in the Emmerhout neighbourhood. It aims to promote greater transparency and the actual implementation of the rights to social care and the Right to Challenge from a human rights perspective. Characterization of Emmerhout Dr. T. Postma, advisor of the local community social enterprise Op Eigen Houtje and a member of the Study group on budget monitoring, characterizes Emmerhout as follows: “In due time it became apparent that the municipality with their initial top down attitude and culture of highly skilled civil servants versus the local workers, could not adequately deal with both local and external circumstances; they, therefore, needed for their policy making more input, knowledge and commitment of the local communities and villages in order to arrive at innovative solutions for complex problems at the policy level. Local organisations like district councils as here in Emmerhout came into life and started to participate as recognized partners for the municipality and showed their strength in working bottom-up and in a certain respect, also middle-out. Therefore, this already proven successful district council was asked to participate in the budget monitoring experiment of the Emmen municipality. We, as a local grass root organization, take part, because it fits in our ambition and vision of having an open government and to govern our own district; another part of our vision is that we need to have empowered, committed, and knowledgeable residents to provide for high quality input and countervailing power vis- à-vis the government and its civil servants to obtain a real ‘civil society’ and realise optimal happiness and wellbeing of our population. Note that this district may be considered a district containing generally people that can be characterized as having on average a low social economic status (i.e. high unemployment, social isolation: loneliness, less urban mobility), and also 1 The
Social Care Thematic Budget is an activity carried out as part of an international project supported by Oxfam Novib, under which Brazil and Uganda apply the methodology at district level and the Netherlands at the neighbourhood level.