The European Union relies heavily on numbers to assess the effectiveness of its social policies. Employment rates, poverty indicators, and composite measures such as the at risk of poverty or social exclusion (AROPE) index are used to track member states’ performance and justify policy recommendations. This is a central feature of the so-called European Semester — the EU’s principal economic and social monitoring tool. Alongside this, vast amounts of EU funding flow into member states through instruments such as the European Social Fund, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.

While these policies indicate steady progress on paper, the reality looks rather different. Bulgaria, a post-communist country and EU member since 2007, has seen a sharp increase in EU funding allocations — from around €265 per person to €1,630 — with the capital, Sofia, receiving the largest share. Yet despite this level of support, persistent deprivation remains widespread. According to Eurostat, around 30 per cent of the Bulgarian population remains at risk of poverty or social exclusion, compared with an EU average of just over 20 per cent. While research has documented the central role of benchmarks in EU social policy evaluation, the lived experiences of those targeted by policy — and what those experiences reveal about actual social impact — remain largely unexplored.

Consider, for example, an EU-funded project designed to support mothers transitioning from maternity leave back into the labour market. Hana, a mother of one, first heard about the Parents to Work project by chance, from another mother she met in a park. What was presented as a straightforward route back to employment quickly became a bureaucratic ordeal: repeated visits to the Labour Office, long journeys with her child and elderly mother, and constant pressure to meet shifting deadlines. Although the scheme was meant to be administered online, signatures had to be collected in person month after month, forcing Hana and her partner to repeatedly rearrange their work and care responsibilities.

Social inclusion through activation

Over the past two decades, EU social policy has increasingly defined social inclusion through labour market participation. Activation policies — prioritising employment, job search, and training — have become the central instrument for addressing poverty and exclusion. This approach is embedded in key EU strategies, from the European Employment Strategy to Europe 2020 and the European Pillar of Social Rights.

This has in turn shaped how social inclusion is measured and how progress towards headline targets is assessed: reducing the number of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion by at least 15 million, raising overall employment to at least 78 per cent, and boosting adult participation in training to at least 60 per cent by 2030. Indicators such as AROPE combine income, material deprivation, and work intensity, reinforcing both the logic of activation and the assumption that paid employment is the primary route to dignity and well-being.

Activation has also driven the expansion of EU-funded projects at the national and local level. In many Central and Eastern European countries, EU social funding now plays a role larger even than domestic social budgets. EU priorities therefore extend well beyond setting policy goals to shaping how projects are designed, administered, and evaluated. What remains far less visible, however, is how these projects function in practice — and who is actually able to benefit from them.

When benchmarks meet the everyday

To examine this gap, my research looked in detail at an EU-funded activation project in Bulgaria called Parents to Work. The project aims to support parents — particularly mothers — in returning to employment by providing subsidised childcare. It aligns closely with EU objectives on work-life balance, labour market participation, and gender equality. Measured through official indicators, Parents to Work appears successful: between 2017 and 2020, more than 9,000 individuals were formally included in the project, figures reported back to the European Commission as evidence of effective activation.

Closer analysis of project data and interviews with participants reveals a more uneven picture, however. Most beneficiaries were already employed, lived in large urban centres such as Sofia, and had higher levels of education. Far fewer unemployed parents, single parents, or families in poorer regions were able to access the scheme.

Participation depended heavily on bureaucratic knowledge and informal resources. Applicants were required to navigate complex administrative procedures, meet strict deadlines, and engage repeatedly with local labour offices. Many relied on family networks — particularly grandparents — to satisfy eligibility requirements, since relatives were often the only trusted and affordable childcare option available.

In some cases, parents had to absorb additional costs themselves, paying beyond the subsidised amount or temporarily leaving employment in order to qualify for support on paper. As a result, individuals were recorded as “successfully activated” not because the project had removed structural barriers, but because they were able to work around them — often through a significant degree of self-organisation that went well beyond anything the scheme required.

What numbers do not capture

From the perspective of EU monitoring, Parents to Work is effective because it generates measurable outputs: participant numbers, contracts signed, and parents returned to work. What these indicators fail to capture are the social and emotional costs of participation.

Bureaucracy is treated as a neutral delivery mechanism, yet it plays a decisive role in shaping who can access support. Activation indicators record labour market entry, but say little about insecurity, stress, or sustainability. Gendered labour remains largely invisible, even though the project relies heavily on women’s unpaid and emotional work — both as mothers navigating the system and as older female relatives serving as subsidised carers. Project data show that most babysitters employed through the scheme were women aged over 50, underscoring its dependence on existing family care structures.

Crucially, there are few mechanisms by which participants’ experiences can feed back into how success is defined. National authorities report compliance with EU targets, but qualitative insights about how projects are actually lived rarely inform evaluation or programme redesign. This allows social inclusion to be declared on paper even when it remains fragile or partial in everyday life.

Why this matters beyond Bulgaria

The Bulgarian case is not an exception. It reflects a broader feature of EU social governance: the reliance on benchmarks as the primary source of policy knowledge. Indicators are treated as objective and neutral, yet they embed strong assumptions about what social inclusion should look like and how it should be achieved.

When inclusion is equated primarily with labour market participation, other dimensions of social life — care, health, security, and dignity — risk being marginalised. Projects are assessed according to their fit with existing indicators, not according to whether they address people’s lived realities. Learning flows upward through reports and templates, but rarely back from policy recipients to EU decision-makers.

If the EU is serious about social inclusion, it needs to complement benchmarks with greater attention to biographies — to how policies are actually lived, navigated, and felt. This does not mean abandoning indicators, but recognising their limits and incorporating qualitative insight, local feedback, and the experiences of those whom policy is meant to serve.

Without this shift, social inclusion risks remaining something that is efficiently measured and convincingly reported, but unevenly experienced. The challenge is not a lack of data, but a failure to listen to the lives behind the numbers.