The UOC Unesco Chair in Education & Technology for Social Change along with CN&SC organized the following research seminar:
Policy and innovation: Reshaping public policy for older people from the local government
Thursday, March 19, 2015
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM (CET)
Barcelona Growth Centre Building, Roc Boronat Street, 117, 7th floor, William J. Mitchell Hall, 08018 Barcelona
The seminar was offered by Gerard Domínguez Reig, UNESCO Chair of Education and Technology for Social Change.
Public policy for older people too often takes this population group as homogeneous and provides general answers which are not promoting their autonomy – albeit effective for some purposes.
The needs of older people are strongly attached to their identity, which can be affected by various items: changes in autonomy, the obsolescence of knowledge – especially when it comes to technology, relationships, physical condition, sense of citizenship, etc. It is possible to link local social services and protection schemes to those dimensions that affect the identity and thus generate new policy patterns to strengthen these items. This way active ageing may be achieved while reinforcing elders’ empowerment and autonomy.
This research proves that there are individual and societal factors that have an impact on the items that make up identity, and this results in different ways of relating to public services. Consequently, public sector could divide policies and services for older people according to different socioeconomic profiles that would help enable more individualized, highly-effective responses. Thus, policy would be able to reshape the items of identity, bringing a more effective public intervention to empower older people.
During the seminar Gerard Domínguez showed us some results of his master’s thesis on public management (Master in Public Management and Public Policy) which was originated from the Exploratory International Workshop “Global Ageing: Rising Challenges & A Quest for Opportunities” held with several IN3 groups from 5-6 November 2013.
Image by Paco CT under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license