This research and innovation project, running from March 2025 to February 2029, aims to uncover the organiсational and ecosystem factors that make Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs) “inclusive and sustainable by design,” and to develop supportive multi-level policy frameworks.
A central feature of WISESHIFT is its focus on three strategic domains where WISEs are particularly active and show strong transformative potential:
- Agri-food systems (sustainable and local food production)
- Repair, reuse, and recycling (circular economy)
- Community and home care for the elderly (inclusive social care)
These domains offer key insights into how WISEs operate at the intersection of social inclusion, sustainability, and local development.
WISESHIFT aims to provide evidence-based and theoretically sound rationales, actionable strategies, and multi-level policy architecture to WISEs, national federations, European networks, and policymakers, highlighting their vital role in fostering inclusive and sustainable transitions within their ecosystems.
More about our objectives:
- To build a solid corpus of knowledge on WISEs’ size, roles, and evolution in the EU 27 MSs, along with Serbia. To co-design a self-assessment tool to evaluate the contribution of WISEs to sustainability.
- To carry out an in-depth analysis of the contributions to inclusive and sustainable transition made by 24 WISEs within their ecosystems using a comprehensive multi-stakeholder approach.
- To perform a comprehensive cross-cutting analysis using the analytical lenses of the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) to identify levers and obstacles of sustainable transition and answer the following question: what are the organisational factors specific to WISEs, that make them potentially “inclusive and sustainable by design”, and the factors that enable them to act as levers in their ecosystems towards an inclusive and sustainable transition?
- To develop a comparative and multi-level framework of analysis to address challenges posed by policies and regulations to the WISEs and, through their lenses, to the social economy.
Overall, WISESHIFT aims to strengthen the tangible role of social economy organizations as catalysts for transformative and systemic change towards more inclusive and sustainable practices within their ecosystems. The project’s insights will support organizations in implementing innovative strategies aligned with the EU social economy strategy, leading to measurable social and environmental benefits.
The project brought together 13 partners from 8 countries, and our faculty is represented by Professor Slobodan Cvejić and Assistant Professor Irena Petrović from the Sociology Department.
More information about WISESHIFT can be found on the project website: https://www.wiseshiftproject.eu/
