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Il contributo analizza il ruolo dell’Innovazione Sociale nel campo delle Scienze Sociali e Umane. Una prima analisi storica fornisce una panoramica delle sue funzioni nella modernità e nelle politiche della Commissione Europea. La varietà di approcci può essere riportata su un continuum ai cui estremi si trovano modelli economici pratico-sociali e modelli orientati a trasformazioni politico-sociali. Lo spostamento dei finanziamenti verso il primo polo risulta problematico. Così come problematica è la poca attenzione rivolta al ruolo della politica e dell’azione collettiva e alle criticità insite nella scalabilità delle pratiche di IS. Da qui la necessità di sviluppare un’epistemologia maggiormente radicata nella società, con maggiore attenzione alla storia, alla sinergia tra micro e macro-teorie e a metodologie inter e transdisciplinari. This Policy Paper examines the role of Social Innovation in Social Sciences and Humanities. It provides a historical overview of the various meanings of SI in modern times and in European Commission policies. This variety can be visualised on a continuum at the extremes of which figure models oriented to practical-social changes and models oriented to political-social transformation. The recent shift of EC research funding towards the practical pole is problematic. The role of the political, politics and collective action and scalability of SI initiatives and practices deserve significantly more research and policy attention, the paper argues. It makes epistemological suggestions on how to reequilibrate the balance between foci and approaches in European SI research.

At the international level, economic, political and civil society institutions have been recently resorting to social partnerships to build networks with several social actors. Partnerships often involve public agencies, private firms and non profit organizations into local development policies. Strengthening the societal role of civil society actors, they also promote the so-called subsidiary practices. Moreover, in Italy there are normative and organizational limits for their implementation. In this perspective, partnerships should become an operative arrangement of welfare society, aiming to govern relations between social actors (market organizations, political organizations and civil society organizations) involved in generalized actions of social policies, especially at the local level. The paper introduces and discusses the results of two qualitative case studies concerning social partnerships established in Lombardia, also by local community foundations, assuming that they are "intermediary trustee". The partnerships case studies test if, and how, the community foundations produce and/or increase social capital of a local community collaborating with other partners. The paper focuses on inter-organizational trust as an important issue for partnership functioning, trying to give an interpretation of its emergence moving from the rational choice and the gift paradigms.

This paper focuses on the Mediterranean coastal monitoring actors (i.e. maritime signaling instruments) such as lighthouses, lights, traffic lights. A twofold motivation behind this choice: on the one hand the 110th anniversary - that will be celebrated in 2021 - of the transfer of the management of the lighting service of the coasts from Italian Ministry of Public Works to the Navy. On the other hand, the willing to illustrate how the Systemic Design methodology can represent a strategic element for the enhancement of a coastal Cultural Heritage such as the one represented by lighthouses.

In this paper, through an analysis of the work life balance policies we try to study how Italy currently facing the needs of care of the new generations of workers. In an increasingly flexible labor market in which workers are less protected, the strengthening of work life balance policies is a central issue for employability. The data analysis, however, shows a substantial immobility of public action, while on the opposite seems to be in place a certain activism from below. Through the analysis of the experiences of co-working with baby space in Rome, the contribution seeks to examine whether and how the spread of these local services can configure a renewal of the Italian work-family policies. The implications and bounds of these practices will be discussed.

In recent decades, reforms in the public sector place new demand on the manage-ment and control practices. Focusing on healthcare there are few investigations that analyse the context related to the design of such practices in a holistic sense. Thus, the aim of the paper is the comprehension of how management accounting and control practices change, even in their nature, as the result of reforms, specifically the introduction of L.R. 23/2015 related to the renew Lombardy Health System. A conceptual model inspired by the middle range thinking guides the analysis of the legislation, notes of interviews, conferences and informal meetings with practitioners. Nine months later the introduction of reform, regulations and the perception of involved practitioners seems oriented towards the design of management accounting and control practices with communicative nature.

This paper presents a survey in the local public policies, in particular in the social services policies of Commons. The purpose is to analyze how much political orientation affects decision-making. Sometimes political orientation affects some specific programming of local policies, but sometimes it doesn’t. Often influence will is constrained by already taken decisions (path dependence) and by government’s effort to overcome the public/private dualism logic. Third sector is considered an alternative to direct management due to its ability to contain services management expense. There is a peculiarity lack of the Third sector. Subsidiarity, indeed, is only seen in a strictly administrative way and not as an instrument to govern from below.

In Italy, the recently launched spending review process seems the only alternative to budgetary cutbacks centrally applied across the board. Fighting waste and corruption while making administrative agencies more effcient and accountable to citizens is a key priority for local and regional governments as well. Yet, current spending reviews are conducted on aggregated broad-based appropriations of public spending and are, then, unable to generate that "usable" knowledge, which regional and local policy makers and managers can rely on for policy design and implementation. Indeed, a centralistic and technocratic modus operandi, heavily relying on civil service downsizing, risks undermining spending review effectiveness as public oversight tool, and reinforcing coercive isomorphism at the expense of political legitimacy and cultural acceptance of administrative performance assessments. This paper addresses such questions as on how a democratic "would-be federal" state operates and to what extent consolidation of public finances can be reckoned as an overriding goal against efficiency and accountability considerations at the local level. Three issues emerge are key to reform: (i) what human resources public administration should invest on to adequately govern localities as well as regions; (ii) what measures are effective to fight waste and corruption; and (iii) what reliability and plausibility current performance measurement have with respect to actual public services offered to citizens.

The paper provides an analysis of the relationships between the public sector and the third sector in the Netherlands. After a brief historical sketch, that describes the age of pillarisation and pacification, the author depicts the present situation, characterised by trends of blurring boundaries and hybridisation between public and private non profit and for profit organisations. Dekker claims that the golden age of public private partnership, identified with the period after pacification, has come to an end: nowadays the same concept of partnership is too simple to describe the patterns of interaction between the government and the third sector. For the next future, the author foresees a situation characterised by a strong differentiation of the organisations on the base of the kind of services delivered, the presence of "social enterprises", the claims for restoring professional autonomy and a revival of civil society.

Per una valutazione civile delle pubbliche amministrazioni - The paper highlights the process of social and institutional change within which evaluation practices are embedded in Italy. To recall the main institutional and normative framework through which the Italian public administration has read its own change can explain the reason why evaluation is necessarily a part of collective decision processes and of their institutionalization. The role participation procedures to public decision processes play in this change reveal the main social and cultural issues which are at stake: the due process and the separation of powers the one no more considered, as it once was, as a criterion and a boundary for administrative action; the other no more assumed as a democratic criterion to distinguish public decisions as either political or administrative ones. Administrative action and political decisions can be no more conclusively identified within the legal framework. They are constituted by the procedural enactment of administrative planning processes; they are also the focus of what we define as civil evaluation: the kind of evaluation processes which are strategic in the re-definition of both citizenship and administration as well as in the institutionalization of their mutual relationship. Key words: institutional change, administrative rules, civil evaluation, collective decisions.