ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we open the debate on the role of innovative policies and practices for and by young people that are aiming at their labour market and social inclusion in the context of current policymaking. We construct a general frame for presenting and interpreting the case studies on the innovative policies and practices on labour market and social inclusion. First, we discuss the paradigm of activation policies and how it evolved since the end of the 1990s, and the outcomes and failures of these activation policies. Next, we focus on the backgrounds of activation policies which may explain their failures and we contrast them with the approach to social exclusion/inclusion emerging from the bottom-up perspective of the excluded people. Lastly, we discuss the role of (social) innovative practices as responses to the failures of activation policies in their specific societal and institutional contexts.
