65

Jean-Baptiste Leclercq, Sophie Coulombe, Marta Llobet Estany, François Soucisse Based on the common definition of what constitutes a welfare state, this article analyzes its reconfiguration by studying the practices of social intervention consisting in the organization (in Quebec) and intervention (in Catalonia). It is through the transformation of these practices and their marked contexts that are affected to different degrees by the “crisis” and the policies of austerity that the authors trace the outlines of a welfare state which are in the process of being redrawn. Community organizers act as a linchpin between public institutions and the “community”, taken into account in this text as a category of public action or common experience. The emergence of new actors, such as private foundations or collectives that arise from social movements, modifies the conception of public policies and shifts the boundaries of the welfare state. In contexts where the welfare state has been weakened, the experiences that supply collective responses to social problems prove themselves to be socially creative.