Torbjörn Forkby

In my dissertation "Youth Care at Home" (2005), I addressed the emergence of a variety of open support and treatment forms for youth that developed during the 1990s. Municipalities aimed to replace institutional care with support forms under their own management, and the term "home care solutions" was coined for this designation. The scope and level of ambition in these solutions marked the beginning of a new chapter in child welfare.

Within this field, several studies with more evaluative ambitions can also be included, where my role can be likened to that of a follow-up researcher. This has involved, among other things, municipalities' attempts to create contexts for preventive open care for youth, often with high ambitions for collaboration. Collaboration, while seeming straightforward, is a very complicated form of work in practice. Particularly complicated is collaboration in areas like this, which is based on a fundamental uncertainty about essential aspects, such as a lack of knowledge about the client and uncertainty about forecasts – what it takes to influence development in a certain direction.

Together with Professor Staffan Höjer, I worked on the FAS-funded project "Purchased Care – Conditions, Actors, and Procurement Processes in the Social Child Welfare Market." The aim was to examine the conditions surrounding purchased care (mostly institutional care), which actors have the greatest influence, and what their influence entails in practice. The background was the increased market orientation of public services, manifested in privatizations and competitive tendering. Even the forms of governance had been influenced by market thinking, where quality comparisons, goal-setting, and follow-up had become more important.

As an extension of the questions discussed in the above project, Staffan Höjer, I, and now Andreas Liljegren continued in another FAS-funded project, "Lay Control of Professions – A Study of Local Political Governance in Child Welfare." The purpose was to investigate the role of laypeople in social child welfare. Today, only three areas in public services have decisions made by laypeople (certain environmental matters, building permits, and within social services). Municipal social services historically originated from an entirely layperson-based system. However, practical work is now carried out by specially trained individuals, but decision-making in certain matters (such as placements for out-of-home care of children) is still handled by laypeople appointed by political parties. They are therefore assumed to play a crucial role in practical work. Research-wise, the role of laypeople in this welfare sector has hardly been noticed at all. In the project, we wanted to investigate and analyze who the laypeople are in relation to representativity, how they act in negotiations and decisions, and whether and, if so, in which cases they go against the administration's proposals.

Additionally, I can mention a comparison between child welfare systems in Nordic countries, where I served as the project leader. An interesting result of this comparison shows that all the examined neighboring countries (Norway, Finland, and Denmark) had similar layperson systems to Sweden but, for reasons such as legal security and the need for specialist expertise in decision-making, have abandoned this. Specifically, this means that laypeople have been replaced entirely or partially by various experts.

A central question for young individuals is how their encounter with "society" unfolds. To what extent do they feel a sense of being needed, having the opportunity to influence, and what does it mean if this recognition is lacking? Furthermore, how do the forms developed to provide opportunities for youth participation function? While participation has become a sort of buzzword concerning young people's transition to the adult world, the meaning of participation is not self-evident, the forms developed by young people themselves, or how the experience of having been involved affects one's development. I have studied these questions through various studies, especially regarding what participation means in the arena of leisure time activities.

One project in this area is PARTIspace, which concerns young people's participation in society. The project was granted research funding from the EU, HORIZON 2020. Here, we investigated young people's formal, non-formal, and informal participation, as well as their agency and actions in the public sphere across eight European countries. The focus was on making visible what young people are actually involved in and what forms work. The project is also somewhat connected to the Youth Work tradition. We followed selected "cases" related to youth participation in the different countries and initiated several action research projects in collaboration with young individuals.