Ugo Ascoli

The Context of New Social Policies in Europe

The last ten years have seen the diffusion of new social risks accompanied by profound demographic transformations and changes in the structure of employment in almost all the countries of the European Union. The crisis of the Fordist organization of work, the lengthening of average life expectancy and the increased instability of the family have all contributed in increasing social inequalities. At the same time a large part of the population of Europe is now exposed to social risk previously rare or confined to specific geographical regions or areas of society: homelessness, intolerance, new social pathologies determined by social isolation and the need for care are appearing. Furthermore, the increase in the demand for care is pervading social groups that until recently were used to satisfy this demand through public welfare provision; today they see access to the providence of welfare reduced as a consequence of rationing policies pursued by the governments of many European countries.

The New Partnership: The Changing Relationship between State and the Third Sector in the Scenario of New Social Policies in Italy

The second half of the 1980s and the 1990s will be remembered in Italy as the period in which privatization assumed increasingly significant proportions as the dominant political strategy in the field of welfare policies (Pasquinelli, 1993). The move towards privatization has been drastic and generalized. It has radically reversed the tendency to extend government intervention that had characterized the growth of the Italian welfare system since the end of the World War II. Until the 1970s, politicians had not only acquiesced to the expansion of welfare spending but had encouraged it. Nevertheless, during the last decade the worsening of fiscal problems and growing political instability (the result of scandals caused by investigations into political corruption) weakened the social consensus surrounding the welfare state and gave room to proposals for radical change (Borzaga et al., 1996).

Changes in the Welfare Mix: The European Path

Between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s a clear change occurred in the orientation of social care policies in almost all the countries of Western Europe. The change arose from the perception of a structural crisis in the previously established mixed model. The main cause of the crisis was identified, in the political rhetoric of the time, in the ‘failure of the state’ to ensure a system of social care adequate to a situation in which social needs were rapidly changing. The crisis was identified at two levels: (1) a financial crisis due to the difficulty in economically sustaining public care programmes in the face of a growing expansion of the demand;1 (2) an organizational crisis, caused by the bureaucratic rigidity and constraints to which public care programmes were subject. Of these two aspects, the first was the most valued: keeping costs down had in fact become the main objective of reform policies of social care systems. Furthermore, the pursuit of this objective seemed to depend inextricably on the possibility of reducing the role and commitment of the state.

From Austerity to Permanent Strain? The European Union and Welfare State Reform in Italy and Spain

This chapter makes a comparative analysis of the trajectories of welfare change in Italy and Spain since the outbreak of the financial crisis. We look at the differences in the types of institutional design to study welfare reform in these two countries and assess how recent changes have affected welfare state institutions. This chapter also assesses the level of the European Union (EU) involvement through formal instruments around the European Semester as well as by the means of agreements with the Troika and the European Central Bank (ECB). For this part of the analysis, three sets of documents have been used: Commission Recommendations and Council Decisions in relation to Excessive Deficit Procedures (EDP); Commission country-specific Recommendations based on Stability or Convergence Programmes, and Policy Measures to boost growth and jobs (National Reform Programmes). These documents allow an analysis of the contents of formal adjustment pressures. Other documents and sources (including newspaper articles) have also been analysed to look at the role of conditionality and ‘backroom’ diplomacy.

Religiously Oriented Welfare Organizations in Italy Before and After the Great Recession: Toward a More Relevant Role in the Provision of Social Services?

This chapter investigates the role played by religious organizations (i.e., Catholic organizations) within the Italian welfare system, focusing on social services. In a long-term perspective, the role played by Catholic organizations has been crucial as far as the specific trajectory of development taken by the Italian system of social services is concerned. Moreover, over the past decades, this relevance seems to have increased due to specific institutional reforms, which have strongly supported a process of “subsidiarization” of social policies, as well as the impact of the current economic recession with the related increase in terms of demand for social services. However, given the fact that this relevance has arisen in a context of welfare state retrenchment and inertia of decision makers, a potential risk for Catholic organizations today is that of playing a more substitutive role (rather than a complementary one) in the delivery of social services, thus exacerbating the overall degree of territorial fragmentation and inequalities existing within Italian society.

Le organizzazioni di terzo settore nelle politiche socio-assistenziali in Europa: realtà diverse a confronto

In this paper we compare the organisational and role changes which have taken place among non-profit organisations working in the field of personal social services in Western European countries during the different phases of the Welfare State. The main hypothesis of the research is that to understand the changes and the development of non-profit organisations it should be used an approach which emphasises in the explanation their social and political embeddedness. It is argued that in the field of personal social services there is a convergence in the 90s among the policies toward nonprofits and the organisational characteristics of this kind of organisations. There is also a partial convergence in the role played by these organisations in the Welfare System, although the convergence in this case is moderated by the different welfare institutional settings developed by the different countries during the last decades.