Risks, Resources and Inequalities: Increasing Resilience in European Families (rEUsilience)

The problem that rEUsilience tackles is of lack of adaptive capacities or resilience in some families. The context is of fast-paced changes in labour markets to which families are key responsive mechanisms, cushioning potentially negative impacts and enabling/disabling risk-taking. But some families cannot respond. The project answers 2 research questions: What challenges and difficulties are created or exacerbated for families by labour markets in the ‘new world of work’ and how do families try to overcome them? How do policies contribute to family resilience especially in terms of their inclusiveness, flexibility and complementarity? To answer these questions rEUsilience looks at what different families actually do in situations calling for adaptiveness (e.g. need to change labour supply, need to engage in training) and places this in a social and policy context through both pan-European analyses of existing data and new focus group research in 6 different countries (BE, ES, HR, PL, SE, UK). The project will identify the level of risk and socio-economic insecurity faced by families across Europe, their relative capacity to absorb socio-economic shocks and the role of policy.
The project is organised in 2 pillars: a Stocktaking pillar and a Policy Lab. The pillars are designed to closely interlink in terms of evidence flow and mission, to share some methodologies and to have inbuilt pathways to impact. The Lab involves citizens and experts directly in policy review and problem solution and also uses simulations and other methods to road-test policy solutions. Among the outputs are: a compendium of the risk situation of Europe's families, a series of dynamic analyses of actual risk behaviour, accounts from families about how they view risk-taking and trade-offs between work and care, critical reviews of policies, a questionnaire on family resilience taken to proof of concept stage, a set of policy proposals and roadmaps for their implementation.