Volume 63, Issue 2

In the context of the debates on poverty prevention pre-primary education plays a key role. In Germany, municipalities are mainly responsible for the local organization of child care. This article discusses a theoretical-derived model of six fields of action for organizing a preventive child care and shows different practices in the implementation. The empirical findings show a heterogeneous overall picture not least because of interdependent relationships between Germany’s federal states and the municipalities. The results show that a better vertical coordination among the local, regional and national level is required to achieve more programmatic and financial support for preventive structure elements in the field of child care.

Severe fiscal constraints form the background for local social policy reform in many German municipalities since the early 2000s. According to a widespread thesis, local governments retreat from voluntary action in the field of social prevention and concentrate on their obligatory functions. The article addresses two questions: First, in how far can we really observe this trade-off between voluntary and obligatory functions? Second, what explains potential deviations from this “austerity thesis” and variation in the scope of local social policy?

Since 2011 German municipalities are responsible for organizing the „BuT-Leistungen“. Ex negativo BuT-Leistungen should prevent children from low-income households from social exclusion, while ex positivo they are intended to expand future chances of participation in society by granting access to socio-cultural activities and education. Based on case studies, our article asks how municipalities strategically shape BuT-Leistungen to become more or less preventative.

This article investigates the implementation of an integrated activation policy in Germany. The activation paradigm has been recently extended to target clients with multiple problems out of employment. In order to do so, an approach of activation is needed that integrates policy fields, policy actors and policy levels. We compare different forms of integration in three German cities and find that local factors really play a significant role.

The article addresses the role of local government in health promotion and prevention in Germany. In a first step, it delineates the goals of health promotion and prevention policies in general and describes how these relate to the definition of prevention given in the editorial. The second part highlights the role of municipalities in health promotion and disease prevention. The third part describes five core elements of local health promotion and prevention policies: local health monitoring, the development of a coherent local health strategy, integration of local (health-related) administration, governance of relevant external actors, and securing participation at all process levels. Each of these five elements is illustrated with examples from North-Rhine Westphalian municipalities. The fourth part describes obstacles that health promoting and preventive policies encounter both in general and at the local level in particular. The author concludes that despite these obstacles, every small step towards more local action should be realized because of its potential to improve the health of the population.

Ideally, preventive social policy measures do not only target children or young adults but complement the whole live course. In a first step, this article develops a conception of preventive care policy addressing (older) persons in need of care as well as their caregivers in Germany. In a second step, the role of municipalities – recently subject to political reform at the federal level – in supporting such a preventive approach to care provision is discussed. On the basis of a literature and social legislation review as well as expert interviews the authors point out that realigning local care policies in a preventive way is conditional on the transfer of steady resources from the federal and state governments to the level of municipalities.