Older adults and Local Solidarities – PASOLO

Our project belongs to the theme of public policies and social innovations facing demographic changes and targets two sub-themes: the transformation of public services and the specificities concerning the provision of public services at the local level.
Throughout Europe and Canada, the proportion of older adults will significantly increase in the future. This population is heterogeneous along social (socio-economic inequalities), familial (differentiated networks of potential caregivers), and cultural (effect of migration dynamics) lines. This heterogeneity leads to important regional disparities within each country. As a result, local contexts affect various dimensions of services offered as well as the different types of support provided by caregivers. Consequently, adapting these services to a local population raises important horizontal equity issues since national policies usually aim to provide similar services throughout the entire territory.
The main goal of our project is to study and compare social policies targeting older adults in France and Québec, and specifically analyse how social and medico-social services take into account local particularities. This requires identifying the appropriate geographical level of analysis and to reconstruct the demographic, social and migratory evolution of the territories. This project also studies policy changes that are triggered by these demographic changes at the local and national levels. In a nutshell, this project aims to construct a multidimensional “biography” of territory.