Matteo Villa

In the shadow of legalism: understanding community participation in an overly bureaucratic context

This article describes a project which set out to reform the social welfare system in Tuscany (Italy) and discusses the action research (AR) conducted as part of the process to enable change, citizen participation and reflexivity. The AR approach helped to highlight tensions operating at local and regional levels, enabling actors and researchers to understand how the bureaucratic culture in which the reform is embedded limited nongovernmental organizations’ participation in the policy-making process. The reflective dialog between the local actors led to the emergence of several barriers, which in turn depleted social resources and the general sense of interest. The same barriers also impinged on the AR, strongly limiting its effectiveness. This article highlights the role of AR in bringing to light several paradoxes of participatory policies as well as in discussing the opportunities and challenges of this approach in sustaining local actors to enable change.

Happy ever after in the quasi-market place? The dowry logic of active labour policy in the Lombardy Region

Purpose – The dote system is the most recent and only way to finance and deliver services in the training and labour policy field in Lombardy (Italy), strengthening the regional quasi-market approach. The purpose of this paper is to analyse its logic and highlight the implications for the policy system. Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative case-study including preliminary documentation, analysis of administrative data, in-depth interviews with stakeholders and practitioners. Findings – The dote system is based on a strongly pre-structured and pure performance logic. It predefines forms, ways and steps towards people’s “autonomy”, further categorising the policy system and establishing a combination of individualisation without personalisation. The strict regulation makes it difficult to design accessible, high-quality and tailor-made interventions. Dote could represent an interesting innovation for high-profile measures, but as a universal equivalent it often fails to match the needs of people and th...

Dono e appropriazione. Il difficile nesso tra welfare e nuove forme del volontariato

The role of voluntarism has become ever more important in the Italian and European discussions on the crisis and transformation of welfare administration. Unfortunately in many cases it is taken for granted in its forms, meanings, roles and procedures. The risk is that the institutional system may choose to face a crisis by following development strategies on the basis of its own needs and preformed visions. This could lead to greatly distorted effects that force some realities to adapt in contradictory ways and drive others that do not follow such paradigms towards extinction. The essay shows pivotal aspects and possible perspectives of the relationship between the variety of voluntarism forms and the welfare system, focusing on assumptions and points of view that will help comprehend some of the recent developments and diverse experiences.

Impresa sociale e politiche di attivazione tra frammentazione istituzionale e risorse territoriali

Impresa sociale e politiche di attivazione tra frammentazione istituzionale e risorse territoriali - The various types of resources mobilised by European social enterprises The objective of this paper is to analyse, on the basis of the substantive definition of the economy (elaborated in the footsteps of Polanyi), the various types of resources mobilised by European social enterprises. European social enterprises use a complex mix of resources based on four types of economic relations: the market, redistribution, the socio-politically embedded market, and the reciprocity. A European typology of Work Integration Social Enterprise (WISEs) is put forward, in order to understand these enterprises’ dynamic across national borders.

The transformative role of the social investment welfare state towards sustainability. Criticisms and potentialities in fragile areas.

The paper discusses criticisms and transformative capabilities ofthe role of social investment policies in fragile areas, as territoriescharacterized by continuous losses in economics of flexibility, that is theuncommitted potentialities for change, learning, adaptation, preservationand evolution. It very briefly presents the social investment main featuresand developments in the transformation of European social policy, beforediscussing some criticisms regarding its current capability in dealing withsocial risks and social exclusion in such contexts. In particular, it addressesthe issues of human capital, productivism and sustainability, arguing for theneed to reflect upon its related assumptions and the opportunity to include amore context-based approach. For this purpose, the paper analyses twoexperiences of community organization through participatory actionresearchimplemented in fragile urban and rural areas, as well as the reasonswhy such kinds of practices could play an important role in identifying andenhancing the transformative potentialities of social investment. Inparticular the latter could be strategically aimed at promoting moresustainable local economies by integrating universalistic/category-basedpolicies with bottom-up context-based interventions, to deal with the rootedcharacteristics that partly cause the problems and partly are the source of thepossible answers.