How to frame the governance dimension of social innovation: theoretical considerations and empirical evidence

Social innovation approach has been increasingly used by governments in delivery of public services, since the development of more and more complex societal challenges requires the establishment of new multi-actor implementation structures and arrangements. More recently, a call for a more robust analytical framework emerged in order to enable evaluation of the growing number and types of socially innovative practices implemented in different European contexts. This article takes up this challenge by assuming the governance perspective on social innovation, i.e. the establishment of new implementation arrangements in relations between the public and non-profit sectors. Drawing on the public governance literature, the article describes a three-step methodology with which to design and implement socially innovative oriented governance, and it illustrates an empirical application to the issue of refugee integration. The article argues that the proposed methodology is suitable both for assessing if and to what extent civil society organizations are actually involved in horizontal and cooperative relations with public actors when new implementation tasks are required, and for guiding scholars and practitioners in investigating what should be improved to achieve socially innovative governance within a public policy process

Institutionalizing innovation in welfare local services through co-production: toward a Neo-Weberian state?

Innovative practices based on the involvement of citizens as co-producers of welfare local services have been increasingly adopted by the public sector to effectively tackle emerging social problems. Despite the development in the literature on this subject, recent studies still do not clearly indicate which are the challenges for the institutionalization of such practices. By applying a governance lens to the analysis of co-production of local public services, this article aims to contribute to bridging this gap through the empirical analysis of the childcare experience in four European cities. More in detail, it debates the concepts of co-production and innovation in public service delivery within the context of the different waves of public administration reforms; and it investigates how three different sets of conditions – namely, state support and capacity; organizational cultures which support innovation; and integration with facilitative technologies – integrate to facilitate or hinder the institutionalization of co-production initiatives. The findings show that the enabling role of the state actor is a sine qua non to guarantee an institutionalization of these practices, particularly concerning the promotion of trust-building processes. Doing so, the article contributes to the international debate about the possible co-existing of the paradigms of public administration that are arising in the last decades to remedy the problems with the New Public Management; and it provides professionals working in public management and administration with key policy recommendations for the elaboration of new governance systems for the provision of social and welfare services

Further to the bottom of the hierarchy: the stratification of forced migrants' welfare rights amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy

This article analyzes how forced migrants have been pushed further down in the hierarchy of social citizenship amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on evidence from research in six cities of north-eastern Italy, we show that their welfare rights have stratified due to national immigration policies that imply unequal access to social protection. Local-level forces – including regional welfare institutions, municipal governments, and civil society organizations – have either magnified or mitigated such state-driven stratification. This process resulted in uneven landscapes of social citizenship, with a minority of migrants relatively well-protected and the others entangled into downward, pandemic-induced spirals of marginalization. In this way various forms of exclusion were activated, and accumulated on, one another – what we define as COVID-19’s ‘ripple effect’. These findings travel beyond Italy as an exemplary case of rampant nativism and urge post-pandemic host societies to emancipate welfare rights from the immigration policies to which they are so often subordinated

Understanding social innovation in refugee integration: actors, practices, politics in Europe

The so-called ' refugee crisis ' marked a crucial juncture in migration governance across Europe. Policy-makers and local communities face the challenge of receiving and integrating migrants (often in extremely vulnerable conditions) in a context of poor governance arrangements and rising skepticism, or even hostility. In the light of such a complex scenario, this special issue explores social innovation as a promising approach to refugee integration. Socially innovative practices are indeed based on the active engagement of policy-makers and assorted stakeholders-including target groups through co-creation. In the realm of asylum policies, social innovation can thus facilitate the meeting of refugees ' needs as well as the benevolence of receiving communities, ultimately strengthening social cohesion in regions of settlement. Families hosting migrants at home, community-based cooperatives, and self-managed social spaces are all instances of socially innovative practices that are often initiated by non-state actors but that might be upscaled and transformed into fully fledged public policies-especially by policy-makers at the local and regional levels. The special issue will focus on labor, housing, and social integration of refugees (especially in the stages after their first reception) in the context of Central European cities and regions. The purpose is to develop conceptual tools for evaluating and designing socially innovative practices that might ultimately improve the social innovation capacity of local and regional governments. As the ' social innovation ' concept risks to be ambiguous, the special issue will also allow researchers to develop a set of empirically grounded indicators for measuring social innovation capacity-especially based on the analysis of best practices that can be upscaled and replicated through mutual learning

Gynaecological Screening for Cervical and Vulvar Malignancies in a Cohort of Systemic Sclerosis Patients: Our Experience and Review of the Literature

Background. Increased incidence of cancer was frequently reported in scleroderma (SSc), but no association with gynaecological malignancies was described in literature. Objectives. To investigate gynaecological neoplasms in SSc patients. Methods. In this cross-sectional analysis, we evaluated 80 SSc patients, living in the same geographical area. We considered all patients undergoing gynaecological evaluation, including pap test as screening for cervical cancer, between January 2008 and December 2014. Results. 55 (68.7%) patients were negative and 20 (25%) presented inflammatory alterations, while cancer or precancerous lesions were found in 5 (6.2%) cases (2 showed cervical cancer (one of them in situ), 1 vulvar melanoma, 1 vulvar intraepithelial neoplasia, and 1 endocervical polyp with immature squamous metaplasia). The frequency of cervical cancer in our series seems higher in comparison to the incidence registered in the same geographical area. The presence of atypical cytological findings correlated with anti-Scl70 autoantibodies (p = 0.022); moreover, the patients with these alterations tended to be older (median 65, range 46-67), if compared to the whole series (p = 0.052). Conclusions. A relatively high frequency of gynaecological malignancies was found in our SSc series. In general, gynaecological evaluation for SSc women needs to be included in the routine patients' surveillance

research policy dialogues in italy

Italy is usually characterised by political scientists as a country with a high degree of penetration of party politics over public administration and civil society. Experts are often considered either marginal or controversial figures. Especially when involved in policymaking, experts tend to be linked to specific political parties, and claims of impartiality are met with suspicion. This explains why in Italy it took a rather long time before a true dialogue between academia and policymakers developed, while once a formal dialogue structure was set in place, in the late 1990s, it did not last very long. Since then, the use of expert knowledge by policy makers has been primarily of a symbolic nature, either of a legitimising or of a substantiating kind, or it has not been used at all. For instrumental utilisation to occur, responsible and interested policymakers and public officials must be in place, a condition that seems to have been met in only few specific cases

dispersal and reception in northern italy comparing systems along the brenner route

In the last decades, policy restrictions and practices at national and local levels have curtailed the rights of seekers and holders of international protection, thus impacting on their lives and on the territories they transit through. This is particularly evident in border contexts. Various border areas have gradually transformed into internal hotspots, with increasing border enforcement. This includes Brenner, situated at the border between Italy and Austria. In the wider Brenner route area, particularly in the nearby Italian cities of Verona, Trento and Bolzano, "spaces of transit" have emerged and both public and humanitarian actors have been "forced" to deal with it. This chapter draws upon the work of the multilevel governance of migration (Caponio and Borkert 2010), and on the proliferation of borders (Mezzadra and Neilson 2016), to present a comparative analysis of the reception scenario in these three cities. By building on qualitative data analysis (legal analysis of policy documents, content analysis of interviews and newspaper articles), it discusses to what extent and how the respective local systems of reception have managed to cater for migrants that transit through them. Similarities and differences are pointed out, as well as the relevance of factors such as geographical proximity in influencing the respective approaches

L\u2019amministrazione a rete: retorica o realt\ue0? L\u2019esperienza delle agenzie ambientali

Del concetto di rete si fa un uso spesso improprio. Passando in rassegna una vastissima letteratura di taglio sociologico, economico ed organizzativo, scopo dell'articolo \ue8 di superare tale vaghezza terminologia e concettuale, mettendo a fuoco le propriet\ue0 distintive dell'organizzazione a rete. Tale modello, una volta elaborato, viene utilizzato per interpretare le fitte relazione che intercorrono tra le agenzie ambientali italiane. Il sistema di tali agenzie costituisce infatti un caso unico nel panorama della pubblica amministrazione italiana, in quanto fin dalla sua origine \ue8 stato concepito come una rete di agenzie, e funzione come tale. La tesi sostenuta in questo lavoro \ue8 che le agenzie ambientali non costituiscono soltanto un reticolo, ma - adottando molte di esse al proprio interno una struttura reticolare - esse si configurano piuttosto come una "rete di reti"