Abstract
SSE has the capacity to facilitate empowerment and the participation of social-service-users and to open opportunities for their self-determination and personal prosperity. For social services and local social policy, SSE opens the opportunity to create new institutional arrangements in which material and non-material resources can be combined in an integrative and productive way. A basic difference between public social services, market providers and SSE-approaches, lies in the specific bottom-linked, integrative and participative context of the formation and management of solutions following the concrete citizens’ needs such as education and care for and with people with special needs or social housing for homeless people as well as employment or qualification of young migrants. A special potential of SSE lies in its power to combine public and private institutions with civil-society actors to a productive mix. Remarkable recent foundations are the integrative approaches in disadvantaged rural areas which combine agricultural multifunctionality and the innovation of social- and healthcare services.