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After having outlined the main raisons to support the growth of more locally based social programs in Italy, this paper examines the historical development of local social policy, focusing on the changes occurred in the 60s, in a time of social reform, and in the 80 and 90s, where public funding cuts have been accompanied by a strong involvement of nonprofit organizations in the provision of social services. The growing introduction of social care markets at the local level and the spread of more strict accountability procedures calls now for a new style of local governance, more focused on partnership, planning capacity, goal selection and evaluation. Such new trends challenge the traditional structure of local government, based on a strict formal control and a weak capacity of goals definition. Between the Scilla of territorial fragmentation and the Cariddi of low fiscal and organizational autonomy of local authorities, the Italian welfare system needs more locally based social programs, to develop along with a broader and clearer recognition of social citizenship.

This essay argues that processes of urban governance represent a key mechanism through which state space has been reorganized across western Europe during the post-1970s period. In this period and in contrast to the project of national sociospatial redistribution associated with the Keynesian welfare national state, Rescaled Competition State Regimes (RCSRs) have emerged throughout western Europe which attempt to promote a geographical reconcentration of productive capacities and economic assets within strategic urban regions and industrial districts. Urban governance therefore represents an essential institutional scaffolding upon which the national and subnational geographies of state regulation are configured as well as one of the major politico-institutional mechanisms through which those geographies are currently being reworked. The essay concludes by underscoring the ways in which RCSRs exacerbate regulatory failures within national, regional and local economies, leading in turn to the introduction of new crisis-management strategies that further differentiate the institutional landscapes of state regulation at both national and subnational scales.

The article aims at showing the growing success of the Multilevel Governance (Mlg) model. After it was invented in the 1990s with reference to European Union, it was largely applied to all democratic countries, as a concept capable to catch the transformations of institutional settings, even outside Europe. The conditions for the development of Mlg are threefold: the existence of many tiers of government; their autonomy in terms of power and resources; the existence of overlapping jurisdictions. In such circumstances policies are likely to be made through a complex and ongoing system of negotiation among different layers of government. Cooperation tends to prevail over top-down decisions. The system entails high transaction costs, but tends to establish a balance between local and national (and supranational) interests. While the traditional conception of democracy was grounded on the image of a demos rooted in a national territory, in the Mlg there are several nested demos, at different levels, that has to interact each other, in order to produce shared policy outcomes.

In the light of the increasing role of local welfare - due both to its functional correspondence with new forms of social insecurity and to the processes of institutional decentralization, underway from many decades in the European countries - the article considers the causes of the difficult transnational comparability of social-health systems and develops an interpretation of soma representative cases based on the analysis of Sespros-Eurostat data. The European experience of welfare territorialisation (intended as decentralisation and autonomy of responsibilities at various subnational government levels, dialoguing directly to the Eu) as well as its own contradictory national experience (pertaining to the role attributed to the national government before law no. 328/2000 and then the reform of Title V of the Constitution) force Italy to search for new ways to achieve the goal of the territorial equity.

There is an institutional deficit in the framework of the 1aw no. 328/2000 which clearly emerges from the analysis of two different processes: the low level of integration between social services and health; and secondly, the difficulties which characterise the day to day running of the local social planning which should provide the «network» for new services. With the federalism processes introduced by the new Title V of the Constitution, these trends are producing great differentiation in local welfare, thus implicitly undermining the original unitary, national model of social citizenship.

The debate on social policies and Cgil commitment to welfare issues has increased considerably in recent years; the first annual conference on these issues, organised last year, is certainly proof of a new centrality and more thorough reflection on this matter by the union. The Cgil has been aware for many years now of the economic and social impact of social policy decisions and of the urgency of their modernisation. The author analyses the most significant stages in this course, outlining the development of the debate inside the union over the last thirty years and mapping the increasing awareness of the importance of translating into concrete action the concept of «overall» union, promoter and defender of interests and living conditions of individuals and families in a vision of a society as a whole which goes beyond the sector viewpoint.

The paper considers some juridical aspects of the norm which gives exclusive legislative power of the State to «determine essential levels of services concerning civil and social rights which must be guaranteed throughout the national territory» (art. 117, comma 2). The purpose is to inquire into the possible risks and opportunities offered by the reinforcement of the territorial autonomies in the perspective of «sustainable inequalities». The analysis is accompanied by a reflection on the many cues offered by the present debate on the argument.

Taking four cases of external advisory support involving Regions and Authorities on processes of information and data collection, the article outlines some positive elements in the connection between the complex processes of constructing information and local subjectivity (policy makers and technical-functional bureaucracies) who have the task of taking decisions on social policies. The critical na-ture of the «information resource» in any real programme and as-sessment approach is thus reiterated.

The article attempts to draw up a balance of the experience of evalu-ating social policies in Italy, stressing how the absence of a national social plan and the prevalence of monetary benefits may explain in part the low attention gave to planning and assessment of social policies. Some significant norms (law no. 285/97, and 49/99) have provided the assessment to be developed, especially at the local level and in relation to specific projects. Only with law no. 328/2000 it has been possible to talk in terms of real opportunities for the programming and assessment of social policies as a whole. In any case, the peculiarity of evaluation’s process in the case of services, thanks also to the contribution of «theory based evaluation» can be consider an important tool for the improvement of policies and democratic participation in their definition.

The dynamics on localisation developing in Italian social policies raise various interrogatives, both in terms of the establishment of a homogeneous framework of social rights, as well as in forms of government’s processes that tend to be fragmentary. The article faces these questions by comparing three regional models of governance: Campania, Lombardia, Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Firstly, some factors of uncertainty in integration and localisation in the European framework are highlighted. Then the paper analyses three regional cases to focus the policy view and the geometries of integration. Lastly, some indications are given on problems of local welfare.

The ageing of the population and the consequent rise in social-health problems related to chronic ill of the elderly represents one of the most difficult challenges faced by local welfare systems. Long-term care services thus play a decisive role in the attempt to deal with a new social demand, linked to the issue of dependency. However the serious balance restraints faced by local authorities, especially following recent government cutbacks, the high cost of many of these services and the increasing responsibility conferred to Regions and Municipalities after the constitutional reform, give rise to the difficult problem of matching supply and demand. One of the solutions offered by the local administrations is to request users to contribute in part to the costs of these services; yet the absence of a clear national framework and a series of legislative shortcomings on these issues have led to great heterogeneity of solutions at the local and regional levels.

The paper analyses the main models of intervention occurring in social services for dependant elderly in Italian regions in the present historical phase that is characterised by the developmental shift in institutional power from national to regional and local levels. The study highlights, on the one hand, the capacity of territories to develop policies for disability in old age, on the other, the trends emerging from interventions examined.

The article examines some of the main results of an inquiry on 100 main towns in Italy on the range of social supply in the various territorial planning regimes. In particular the analysis is focused on the integration aspects of social policies from the organisational perspective of welfare systems. In fact integration is considered one of the possible solutions to the problem of fragmentation and imbalance which characterises welfare. Although there are some good practices randomly distributed throughout the country, the main feature is the distribution of traditional social supply characterised by the poor presence of integrated services both in social/welfare services - most of the councils offer systems structured according to traditional users - and in social/welfare and other areas of social policies such as health and work.

The article offers the initial results of an study on recognition modalities and styles of response to social demand, as well as on criteria and access’ procedures to local service systems in three metropolitan areas - Milan, Rome, Naples. In these three areas, interpretations and analyses of social needs focused on the available supply or on socio-demographic variables are outnumber. Such a result is due, in particular, to a generalised lack of integrated modalities to access to service system: the access to local service systems is diversified for targets of users and/or for areas of needs, or still linked to traditional approach to services provision. Therefore, on a day to day practice, informal procedures are adopted often based on «case by case» and emergency assessments, without any systemic criteria of analysis of the overall demand, both at the individual and territorial levels.

The paper is aimed at illustrating the design of an empirical research, currently underway at the University of Urbino, whose objective of analysis is the activation measures in the social-economic intervention plans in some Italian cities, which is part of a broader study on «Transformations in Italian society» funded under the programme Prin 2003-2005. The research begins from the necessity to develop an analysis, already started some years ago, in the light of important legis-lative reforms on social services in Italy in the last decade. After having illustrated the theoretical and empirical reference framework from which cognitive requirements of the study and its design emerge, the article presents some of its initial results.

The present paper is the result of a research sets to identify how the relationship between transformations in the governance of social policies and old and new social justice issues are concretely structured in a specific context: the city of Bologna. From such a perspective, the researchers focused on the main contents of local work insertion policies and changes that have occurred as a result of the many actors involved. Taking the regional and local context of active policies as a reference point, without disregarding socio-territorial and institutional features, an introduction is given of the main aspects of these policies, the tools used for their ideation and the main transformations undergone. Lastly, a specific work insertion programme recently experimented in this area is presented as an example of the typical problems encountered in active policies and in the governance of a plurality of actors.

Participatory budgeting is a decision-making process by which the citizens decide on investment spending in their own territory. This practice emerged almost 20 years ago in Porto Alegre and has now become common in our country, to such an extent that an association of local authorities which adopt this procedure has been set up. The union has shown an interest in this instrument, seen as a way of enriching local democracy: but what is its real role in a process which puts the citizen centre stage thus taking power away from the intermediary bodies? What is the role of social territorial bargaining? The paper poses these questions, arguing about the difficult, but necessary, link between the need of direct democracy and the specific role of the unions that gave an important contribution to sketching the outlines of modern local welfare.

The article describes two emblematic cases inspired by the experimental approach of the implementation of innovative services: the project «100 porte sociali» («social doors») realized in Rome and the network of Citizenship offices promoted by the Umbria Region. Both experiences refer to the design of a service profile which is generally called «access welfare». The description concludes with an attempt to give a comparative assessment of the two models highlighting the strategic aspects which may anticipate a possible development in the reorientation of the function of social services in an era of reflexive modernity.

The paper provides a description of the experimental programme for the prevention of social isolation and mortality of the elderly run by the Comunità di Sant’Egidio in March 2004 in two areas of Rome. This programme stems from the need to provide practical solutions to the requirements of the elderly population through innovative measures targeted at the social support networks. Demographic scenarios and limited economic resources seem to influence administrators and political decision-makers towards an approach to emergencies, more than strategies aimed at the search for solutions able to remove causes, forgetting how necessary and practicable can be supporting networks and also how they can be farsighted in terms of economic costs.

The will of public administrations to adopt social accounting stems from the need to better communicate the activities promoted by the authority to the various stakeholders. Publishing the results of the work through social accounting can be also an instrument to increase consensus for the administrators. In most cases, social accounting is used at the final stages while its full implementation can be obtained during the auditing in order to reach an agreement on the measures to pursue between different actors in the territory, and when it allows the collectivity to affect on important issues of public management, as a communication tool of the administrative apparatus. Present social accounting does not refer to any model, but it is possible to identify some elements which influence the structure such as the type of authority, the time span in consideration and the set objectives.

The concept of governance refers to a specific way to manage the government which results from the aim to give a response to the crisis of governability caused by the growing uncertainty and complexity of contemporary society. The article analyses, by reconstructing the stages which led to its affirmation, the shift from government to governance interpreted on the one hand through the process and reasons of decentralisation and on the other with reference to transformations in the Fordist system of economic production. The concept of governance is then presented and analysed from the theoretical-conceptual perspective and, lastly, considered in the Italian context.