Reorganization of Social Work Centers Between Declared and Actual

The reorganization of SWC represents a strategic and far-reaching intervention in the Slovenian social welfare system. Nevertheless, it has not yet been evaluated by decision-makers. Dr. Matej Babšek's work is therefore even more significant as it represents the first comprehensive study. It was conducted under the mentorship of Prof. Dr. Polonca Kovač and co-mentorship of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nina Tomaževič.

The evaluation results generally show that the key stakeholders of the reform assess its outcomes differently – the line ministry predominantly positively, SWC employees predominantly negatively (with statistically significant differences between management and professional workers who work directly with people), and service users mostly indifferently – although they were the key targets of the reform, nothing significant has changed for them after its implementation. The introduction of an informational calculation in the field of social benefits is seen as the most positive outcome of the reform. The reform results are mainly reflected in organizational changes, which by themselves have not ensured the necessary and politically declared substantive changes in SWC work, both in terms of more holistic, accessible, professional, and administratively less burdensome services for users and better working conditions for employees.

The research highlights the misalignment between institutional and instrumental public governance, i.e., between the formulation of reform policies at the ministry level and their implementation at the level of executors, as the key reason for weak institutional reform capacity in the Slovenian administrative space. At the level of political decision-making in the social welfare system, this is manifested as a lack of focus on the protection of the public interest as a social consensus on the protection of vulnerable individuals and groups, a lack of active stakeholder participation, more politically appealing than professionally justified solutions, and more broadly, a lack of a central intersectoral government coordination body for planning, implementing, and evaluating reforms. At the organizational level of executors, this consequently manifests mainly in rigid communication models and poor change management as the effect of administrative reforms. The reforms of SWC, as typical representatives of so-called street-level bureaucracy, cannot proceed solely on a "top-down" approach due to the sensitive nature of working with people.