§ 44b SGB II determines that employment offices (Agenturen für Arbeit) and municipal administrations, as responsible welfare institutions for job-seeking persons, shall establish consortiums in order to administer their functions. The consortiums assume the functions of the employment offices as funding agencies according to SGB II. Municipal institutions shall confer the exertion of their duties that accrue from SGB II to the consortiums. Consortiums are authorized to issue administrative acts and to file objections in order to execute their duties. They can be founded as limited liability corporations (GmbH), civil law associations (GbR) or on a contract subject to public law. However, only a few aspects concerning the organization of the consortiums are prescribed by law (e. g., a common contact point and face-to-face contact persons for all clients).

The law cedes deliberately organizational issues as well as procedural focal points to the local bodies to account for special characteristics of the involved institutions and of the regional economic structure and labor market. The experimentation clause also allows 69 municipal administrations - hereunder 63 counties (Landkreise) - to compete with the consortiums and to explore alternative means of reintegration, where the municipal welfare institutions act as responsible bodies according to SGB II instead of the employment offices (those municipalities are called opting municipalities).

The evaluation of the experimentation clause in § 6c SGB II has two goals. Firstly, the implementation and realization of SGB II by the local bodies shall be observed and documented. Secondly, the effects of the experimentation clause shall be analyzed and the underlying mechanisms shall be framed. The tendered project compound of four research fields evaluating the experimentation clause should particularly answer the question which models are finally the most successful ones on the labor market. The comparative evaluation of the models opting municipality and consortium takes center stage, whereas it can be assumed that there is partly considerable heterogeneity among both models concerning the organizational and procedural form. Therefore, an appropriate interpretation of § 6c SGB II will be possible only if the organizational diversity is also taken into account alongside the two basic models and if it is furthermore considered that - in some municipalities - there exist models of separate responsibility.

Research field 1 descriptive analysis and matching plays a decisive role for the whole compound and should establish the groundwork for the other research fields in terms of an efficient project development and the use of synergies concerning the data and their preparation.