L Bifulco

Contracting for Welfare Services in Italy

The 1990’s witnessed the spread and broadening in Europe of different types of relationships between public administration and private organisations (both profit and non-profit), derived from the two main categories of contracting out and accreditation. These models, linked to the process of developing new modes of governance, also focus on forms of contracting between providers and users of services. This contractual configuration of local welfare systems appears to encourage ‘civil society’ and recipients to play a more active role in designing interventions and putting them into practice. Nonetheless, several questions still remain to be answered. Mainly concerning the different position adopted by the beneficiaries in the case of intervention theoretically aimed at ensuring or increasing their ‘freedom of choice’, this article sets out to analyse these questions with specific reference to the implementation of the Italian legal reform of social services. The field of observation covers interventions based on economic benefits looking to promote recipients’ independence. Our intention is to focus on whether and how the present structures incorporate and elaborate this impulse towards change, with particular reference to the new configuration of the users’ own position.

Citizen participation, agency and voice

Citizen participation, by now one of the main topics on the institutional agenda in many European countries, involves different fields of public action, mostly on a local level – social inclusion, urban renewal, development, the environment, health/social services, etc. It still remains, however, vague as a concept with a great variety of actors, procedures and powers involved in its practices. In this scenario, the present article asks two questions: what powers and what freedoms are involved in participation? How are they constructed and increased? The article then goes on to argue how voice is relevant for understanding the many stories of participation, referring to the classic concept of voice formulated by Albert Hirschman and the elaborations offered by Amartya Sen and Arjun Appadurai in their dialogue over capabilities and capacities.

Citizenship and governance at a time of territorialization: The Italian local welfare between innovation and fragmentation

The paper investigates the territorialization process with a twofold aim: to focus on the territory as the medium of the current relation between citizenship and governance; and to analyse the problems and opportunities created by governance and territorialization. After outlining an interpretative frame for territorialization in Europe, the paper concentrates on the Italian case and on two policy instruments: Area Social Plans and Neighbourhood Contracts. Light will be shed on how moves towards innovations intertwine with dynamics of fragmentation, thereby creating the complexity of territorialization in Italy.

Becoming Public Notes on Governance and Local Welfare in Italy

As the sectors of intervention traditionally assigned to the responsibility of the State gradually become spaces of mobilization for a plurality of actors, the notion of “public” appears problematic: it is difficult to define what distinguishes the structures of governance, the actors involved, and the problems and interests treated, as being of a public nature. This article tackles these issues with particular attention given to governance of social policies in Italy. The aim is twofold: to shed light on the ambivalence of the current transformations of the public realm and to outline their implications with respect to public administration.

Competences and social participation in local social policies: the Italian Area Social Plans

ABSTRACT Drawing on the results of research on 20 Area Social Plans, the article analyses the competences for participation and the role that they perform as a linkage between models/theories and practices of participation. We investigate in particular the conceptual models and representations of officials and politicians in regard to the competences deemed important for promoting social participation. Besides giving voice to those who actually design and implement the Plans, often working on the front line, these representations enlighten the strengths and weaknesses of social participation. The underlying trend that emerges from the research is the centrality of a relational framework of participation. This entails some problems. There is a risk of a reductive vision which gives overwhelming weight to personal skills of communicative type. This would devalue both institutional contexts (in terms of resources and facilitating factors or, conversely, disincentives) and the intersubjective dimension at the basis of communicative skills. The risk, in short, is the trivialisation of relational skills. The most important point is that conceiving skills as equivalent to personal abilities leads to evasion of questions concerning how to elicit, transmit, and reorganise knowledge for participation.

Da strutture a processi: servizi, spazi e territori del welfare locale

In line with what can be observed at a European level, the re-ordering of social assistance recently approved in Italy establishes directives for change centring on three main criteria: integration, activation, localization. Taken as a whole, these criteria point to the affirmation of an emphasis on the social policies processes, in particular of the processes of integration between sectors and actors and the processes of empowerment of recipients. This paper presents the results of a research on social services for children and the elderly in two Italian metropolitan areas, Milan and Naples, in order to analyse how these directives take concrete shapes in the organizational practices. More precisely, we observe the organizational space of the social services and its potential as generative factor. Indeed, as other symbolic components of organizational life, space is a medium of sense-making processes: it influences relationships, it conveys and creates meanings and it enacts action contexts. Firstly, we refer to the organizational theory in order to focus on the potential of organizational space to act as a generative factor. Then, taking as our basis the research carried out, we analyse how some spatial variables affect organizational practices, in order to understand if and how the relevance of processes takes place, or fails, in particular concerning the practices of territorial integration and the empowerment of recipients.

The public at a time of crisis: some notes on the Italian case

The article focuses on some dynamics affecting the public in Italy in connection with the financial and economic crisis. The hypothesis is that, faced with a growing desire for state, processes of institutional mediation underway are further weakening. The analysis goes into depth in some Italian policy cases: university and secondary school on a national level and vocational training policies in a regional context. These cases show rather critical phenomena as far as the public is concerned: the debate on research and knowledge is impoverishing; the change in the structure of the state is teetering between the possibility of solving secular problems and the risk of further endangering a collective service; and there are many signals of privatisation of citizenship. In the conclusions, some interpretive points on the themes of public, future and democracy are developed. Copyright