This series of WILCO Project local studies of policy orientations and values contributes to the understanding of the role of policy ideas, orientations and values in the interplay with innovations for social cohesion. Innovative approaches are usually not mainstream but can be linked to mainstream politics as part of a reform approach in the political administrative system (PAS), be co-funded by it or simply link to it as criticism, suggestions and messages that come from the innovators.

Certain concerns shape inquiry and analysis of welfare innovation in its political context:

• Plurality of discourses: for understanding the interplay of politics and innovations it is important to see them in a tension field structured by the juxtaposition and rivalry of different discourses;
• The impact of history: practices and values that guide action and politics are very much coined by historical developments and experiences;
• Differences between policy fields: While there may be often a kind of overarching narrative, shaped by national politics and dominating local coalitions, due to a number of factors, situations in different policy field may vary;
• Political administrative system and welfare system: understanding a welfare system as large and mixed, comprising of the fields family and community, business sector and third sector of associations we look at welfare developments and their role as part of a mixed and encompassing welfare system.

The English of this report series has not been edited yet.

Milan City Report 414KB

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Local contexts are important in order to understand innovations and change on the local level:

Innovations are embedded in local welfare discourses that can be about classical welfare issues, managerial or encourage participation and pluralism. Such discourses will influence the political opportunity structures for social innovation.

In addition to that, there is a level of historical path-dependency that determines innovation success to some extent.

Welfare is a complex system that encompasses different administrative welfare units as much as the general political system. Innovations should be understood in relation to this complex environment.
Finally, innovative ideas might be restricted by the locally prevailing general discourse but may get much endorsement by a community of experts in a special policy field and thus reduce limits for innovative concepts.

Among the many context factors that have an impact on innovations and their further development, the strategies and value orientations of the local political administrative system are still of central importance. Local politics and governance include increasingly interactions with partners reaching from casual arrangements and agreements in networks over to cross-sector partnerships and corporatist frameworks.

Even though welfare innovations are in many ways nationally and locally specific, there are traits of innovations that are international in character:

Innovations entail approaches and instruments that enrich and change the classical tool kits of social welfare and service policies, e.g. developing services that give personalized bundles of support or creating new forms of social investments into people’s capabilities.

They entail innovations in public governance to various degrees, i.e. when networks and coalition are built across departments and sectors are part of many innovative projects and sometimes even “meta-governance” takes new forms of deliberation and consent finding in search for the public good.
Shared features point to the links between these innovations and post-traditional welfare concepts: services that address the strengths and not merely the weaknesses of their target groups are examples for enabling welfare concepts and the ways new services are more family minded, personalized, but tie in people’s support networks contributes to an upgrading of the role of communities in mixed welfare systems

What role can innovative organisations play within these forms of governance and policy-making? Pointing at the innovative quality of organisations and projects can give additional support for developing policies that give social innovation a place in the overall changing architecture of welfare governance. This series of city reports offers an insight in many inspiring social and public innovations that offer plenty food for thought and further analysis.

Milan report on innovations 1,2MB

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The Politecnico di Milano is the leading Italian University in the fields of engineering, architecture and planning. The Dipartimento di Architettura e Pianificazione (Architecture and Planning, DiAP) is the second largest Department in the Politecnico di Milano and the largest in the field of Architecture. The multidisciplinary approach is a particular characteristic of the department, that is able to offer expertise and products to meet emerging demands from processes of physical and social change. DiAP is active in many fields of research and consultancy, such as territorial analysis, analysis and design of planning processes, local policies, strategic planning, environmental planning, social planning, architectural and urban projects. The Diap promotes many international activities, including teaching staff mobility, international workshops, intensive programmes in cooperation with European partners, an international lecture series. The Social Policy Lab in the Diap specifically studies the relationship between sociological analysis and social policy and contributes through its research activities to the knowledge and evaluation of the policies and social intervention programmes.

The objective of the Social Policy Lab is to provide tools for comprehension and guidance for those who make and carry out social policy. Thus the SPL engages in both theoretic and applicative research and study activities. In particular, the Lab seeks to shed light on the following:

• organizational, institutional, and cultural processes which define the content and method of social policy, and the social and political effects of its subsequent implementation;
• the social, territorial, and political processes and factors which contribute to social vulnerability and social risk, with a wide range view of problems of social cohesion, especially with regards to urban economic development dynamics;
• forms of third sector organization and political action, in addition to coordination between public actors, non-profit organizations and private actors, and citizen involvement in the definition and implementation of social policy;
• problems of disability and dependence, strategies adopted by individuals and families to overcome such problems, and the social policies and reform programmes created to provide for the care of and assistance to disabled members of the society;
• poverty, urban policies and urban conflicts in global cities.

Costanzo Ranci Ortigosa

The team leader, Costanzo Ranci Ortigosa, is a full professor of Economic Sociology at the Polytechnic of Milan, Faculty of Architecture and Society. Prof. Dr. Ranci is one of Italy’s internationally known experts on welfare policy. He is the scientific director of the Master program “Social planning. Design, management and evaluation of Social Policies”, promoted by Polytechnic of Milan, in cooperation with the Institute for Social Research. Since 2005 he is a member of the ASP Board, Alta Scuola Politecnica (Master of Science in Engineering and Architecture) founded by Polytechnic of Milano and Polytechnic of Torino. He has published numerous articles and books on social policy and the welfare state, the third sector and voluntary organizations, social exclusion and social risks, as well as social movements. These include Dilemmas of the Welfare Mix: The New Structure of Welfare in an Era of Privatization (2002); Italy: Observatory for the Development of Social Services (2003); E. Pavolini, C. Ranci (2008), Restructuring the welfare state: reforms in log-term care in Western European countries, Journal of European Social Policy, vol. 3; p. 246-259.

Contact information: Costanzo Ranci: costanzo.ranci@polimi.it

Other members

Giuliana Costa

Is Assistant Professor of Sociology since 2008. Her main research interests are welfare policies and the relationship between space, economy and society. She works at DIAP- Politecnico di Milano since 1998. She is one of the founders of the “Laboratorio di Politiche Sociali” at the same University. After her graduation in Business at Università Bocconi and many years of professional activity in public and private organizations, she got a PhD in Sociology at the Università degli Studi di Milano.

Stefania Sabatinelli

Is post-doc research fellow at the Department of Architecture and Planning of the Polytechnic of Milan, where she teaches compared Welfare Policies. Her research activities mainly deal with comparative analysis of welfare systems, with a focus on activation and care policies, and with particular attention about relations among different scales and sectors.

www.polimi.it

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This city report maps the problems of social inequality and cohesion at the local level, as the background for the research on local social innovations in the subsequent part of the project. The report includes

• (1) an analysis of the main characteristics and trends of the local labour market (main sectors, employment and unemployment levels, groups of population mainly affected by long-term unemployment);
• (2) an analysis of demographic structure of the population and of the trends taking place in the preceding ten years (proportion of the elderly, fertility and natality rates, proportion of immigrants and their distribution in the urban territory, etc.);
• (3) an analysis of the housing market, with special attention to critical situations such as overcrowding, difficult affordability, evictions, homelessness;
• (4) an analysis of migration trends, of migrants’ flows into the city, of the composition of migrant population, its features, changes and possible risks of exclusion and segregation.

Social Innovation in Milan 1,9 MB

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