The Journal of Regional Research – Investigaciones Regionales (http://investigacionesregionales.org/en) announces a call for papers for a Special Issue devoted to the spatial dimension of Social Inclusion policies.

The special issue is titled “Towards a social inclusion model: territorial experiences and challenges”, and expects to collect research articles and letters, devoted to topics such as

• Inclusion strategies within and between regions and cities, including comparative analysis;
• Community development to promote social inclusion
• Childhood investment to prevent the social exclusion
• Inclusive employment policies and intervention programs
• Good practices of coordination within and between social services and employment services

The promotion of social and territorial inclusion in Europe is one of the goals of European 2020 Horizon and to this day, it is a commitment acquired by the different European countries. European policies such as the Structural funds and the European Social Fuds are mainly focused on the fight against unemployment and poverty, such as job activation programs. Nevertheless, Social Inclusion is a multidimensional process, including social networks, participation, housing, etc. In this line, recent studies emphasize that the inclusion strategy in Europe must contemplate different sustainable goals such as adequate protection on basic income systems, community development, childhood investment, inclusive employment policies, social services or partnership alliances.

Several studies have advanced in the comparative analysis of minimum income policy impact on poverty reduction (OECD, 2017, Atkinson et al., 2010) or the diagnosis of new social exclusion dynamics (Förster, et al., 2003; European Commission, 2015). The impact of the economic crisis and austerity policies are having devastating effects on social protection (Taylor-Gooby, 2017). As a result, various restrictive actions have been implemented to access economic benefits or employment inclusion policies for vulnerable groups (Targeting strategy). However, other territories opted for actions that reinforced the inclusion process with programs such as Housing First (Feantsa, 2016), community networks or investment actions in childhood (European Social Network, 2014). All these experiences can help identify some innovations in the inclusion field, with potential for mutual learning between territories.

Special Editor: this Special Issue is edited by Miguel Laparra. The volume collects international works on Social Inclusion and also works resulting from the INCLUSIVE project (CSO2014-51901-P, funded by Spanish Ministry 2015-2017) and also welcomes other works on this topic.

 

The Journal of Regional Research – Investigaciones Regionales is the flagship journal of the Spanish Regional Science Association (https://investigacionesregionales.org/en/). While being specialized in regional issues, this journal is multidisciplinary and strongly devoted to European and Latin American topics. It is an academic journal, where all papers are subject to a double and blind review process. The journal is full Open Access, free for authors and readers. It is indexed in Clarivate’s Analytics Emerging Sources Citation Index and in Scopus, where it is listed in the first quartile of Economics according to the 2017 CiteScore rank.

 

Deadlines and publication schedule

• December 21^st, 2018: Deadline for Title and Abstract (regionales@uah.es)
• February 28^th, 2019: Deadline for full papers submission
• Expected publication: Fall 2019 – Early 2020.

 

Submission Instructions

• All works submitted must be analytic and rigorous and will be subject to the normal blind refereeing process undertaken by the journal.
• All submitted works must not be under review by any other journal
• Letters should be about 3,000 words. Full articles are should have between 8,000 and 10,000 words.
• Submission guidelines are reported at https://investigacionesregionales.org/en/envio-de-articulos/submission-of-papers-and-others-contributions/
• The article will be sent through the portal Open Journal System (OJS) of the Spanish Repository of Science and Technology (RECYT): https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/IR/login.