The chapter provides an overview of the book’s presented themes and the content of this book which is titled ‘Welfare services – National Policies and Local Experiences’. The chapter presents the background, as well as the purpose and the structure of the book. The book presents the ‘state-of- the art’ of the Norwegian welfare model, in addition to experienced challenges. Also, the chapter outlines methods used and analysis undertaken by the involved researchers that have contributed to the volume. Finally, an overview of the 12 chapters is presented.

This chapter provides an overarching description of the content and development of the Norwegian welfare model. We describe some of the basic features of the model, such as mechanisms to promote social equality, the service intensity and the central role of municipalities. We also discuss developments in the model, which in several areas show similarities with changes that have occurred also in other European welfare states. In the 2000s, the EU has shown ambition to promote a more active welfare policy, reflecting the recognition that the austerity and activation policy of the 1990s had adverse effects. We argue that what has been called in the EU the “social investment policy”, with some reference to the Nordic model, has a different philosophy than the one underlying the Nordic model.

State policies for children and young people state that municipal services which are aimed at supporting children and young people should cooperate closely in order to secure tailored services and preventive measures. However, our analyses in this chapter show three main features of municipal services for children and young people, which might be seen as hindrances to close cooperation. Intensification and specialisation within the services due to ever more complicated life situations for children and youth, as well as localisation and municipal organisation models, seem to represent obstacles to close cooperation.

The chapter concerns municipal services for people with intellectual disabilities. It discusses the conditions and challenges in these services as reported by the municipalities themselves. The chapter is based on individual interviews with managers and professional service workers in this particular service in one small and one larger municipality in Norway. Interviewees describe a service that struggles with scarce resources and difficulty in recruiting trained professionals. The study confirms the picture drawn in other studies of a service characterized by collective housing with little room for individuality, choice and social participation, but the study also reveals growing tensions between traditional care and increasing demands for self-determination and autonomy. The analysis points at the risk that the latter may be used as a legitimation for further rationalization of services.

In this chapter we discuss how providers working with refugee services experience the conditions under which they work. The chapter is based on analyses of individual interviews with providers working in municipal refugee services and in other services aimed at refugees. The municipalities have extended experience with refugee settlement. Our analyses show that the municipal refugee services experience challenges related to how they are governed, the role they are charged with and take on as a mediator between refugees and service providers, and the lack of boundaries that exists concerning a division of responsibility and organization of tasks between services.

This chapter displays and discusses state and challenges of municipal mental health services, as experienced by service providers. Important questions are how the municipalities organize the services, fields of tension that occur, and how service providers handle these in everyday work. Key findings point at scarcity of resources, specific organizational aspects and prioritizing as contributory to the service provider’s everyday work. Front-line service providers describe performing a variety of functions in a service characterized by distinctive relational features.

The chapter deals with how substance abuse services within the municipal are performed by competent and committed professionals and by middle managers who seem to act as buffers between system requirements and professional work. However, the services are vulnerable both because of a lack of resources within a field where the political ambitions and the needs seem to increase, and a culture that entails expectations for a personal responsibility to meet the needs and stretch the resources.

An important objective for home-based care services in Norwegian municipalities is to provide home-based care services so that elderly people can live in their home as long as possible. We have interviewed employees at home-based care services in two municipalities about conditions and challenges in their daily work. This article shows that organizing the home-based service according to the purchaser-provider organization serves as a buffer for the employees in their daily work towards wishes and demands of the elderly. Extensive delineation work is often required to manage resource scarcity and is done in different ways. Furthermore, it is expected that the elderly will need to move to a more practical home if the need for assistance increases. The Government`s objectives about equal services, regardless of where the elderly live, are considered unrealistic.

This chapter is about income security as part of the welfare state. Particular attention is paid to the establishment of the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (Nav) from 2006, and to what this meant for the management of income security schemes. The Nav-reform should provide more jobs for people outside working life, and streamline the administration’s activities through the merger of organizations, centralization of case management, new use of ICT and focus on counselling and follow-up on users. The aim of this chapter is not to evaluate the extent to which Nav has succeeded in achieving these goals, but rather to discuss how the reform has affected the services related to income security, based partly on experiences from small Nav offices.

This chapter shows how discourses of user involvement on an individual- and system level, has developed through a rights-based, consumer- and co-creative discourse. Drawing on the previous chapters in this book, we discuss how the ideals and goals has been implemented in context of welfare policy, based on the experiences of employees in the municipal services.

Over the last twenty years, implementation of health technology in elderly care has become increasingly important both as political ambition, practical reality, and as a research topic. This chapter presents a review of key political documents on health technology as well as empirical research on the use of such technology in the context of service provision to home-dwelling elderly people. Although in some contexts, health technology offers great opportunities for improving efficiency and quality of the care services, it also generates unintended consequences in terms of new tasks, new needs and new responsibilities.

In this chapter we cross-analyse the findings from the various case studies looking for key patterns which help us understand the current state of the Norwegian welfare model. We examine some overarching themes which all reveal key challenges within services: the relationship between resources and the need for services, key characteristics of service users and how these shape the content and organization of services, and the relationship between professional skills, practice-based logics, and professional roles among service providers in various services.

This chapter discusses the findings presented in this book in relation to central cultural-historical developments and the values and characteristics associated with the Norwegian and Nordic welfare model. Like other welfare models, the Norwegian welfare model has been increasingly influenced by international political trends. At the same time, this influence is not as noticeable in Norway as in other countries, at least not for the majority of the population. Our study suggests that this is linked to the municipalities’ continuing ability to compensate for structural changes. However, the conditions for this ability are today under intense pressure.