Governance Beyond the Rhetoric: Organizational Action, Change, and Illusion in the Italian Local Welfare System

• Author: Angelo Gasparre,Matteo Bassoli
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0095399719875457
• Date: 01 July 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399719875457

Administration & Society

2020, Vol. 52(6) 927 –958

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DOI: 10.1177/0095399719875457

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Article

Governance Beyond the

Rhetoric: Organizational

Action, Change, and

Illusion in the Italian

Local Welfare System

Angelo Gasparre1 and Matteo Bassoli2

Abstract

In this article, we offer a critical analysis of governance arrangements

looking at the evolution of the Italian local welfare system over a time

period of more than 40 years. The broad idea of a shift “from government

to governance” is questioned. The nonprofit organizations had a vital

role in the foundation of the Italian local welfare system. However, their

participation in the governance arenas of today is often illusionary. This has

practical consequences, as innovation in the welfare domain needs authentic

public–private partnerships, and genuine participation of the nonprofits at all

levels of social and political action.

Keywords

governance, nonprofit, local welfare, organizational change, government,

participation

Introduction

The growth of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) during the last 40 years has

profound implications for public policy and management (Bode, 2017). Even

1Universita degli Studi di Genova, Italy

2Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy

Corresponding Author:

Angelo Gasparre, Universita degli studi di Genova, Via Vivaldi, 5, Genoa 16126, Italy.

Email: angelo.gasparre@economia.unige.it

875457AASXXX10.1177/0095399719875457Administration & SocietyGasparre and Bassoli

research-article2019

928 Administration & Society 52(6)

though cooperation with public institutions had always existed, the widely

accepted view is that during the 1990s policy-making in the Western world

faced a paradigm shift “from government to governance” at the local level

(Kooiman, 2003; Sørensen & Torfing, 2016). This shift was from a closed

system that developed inside the formal boundaries of public authorities

toward an open system whose regulation is shared between local govern-

ments and the private sector.

This change is often depicted as, or assumed to be, a positive one. Such

evaluations consider the need for flexibility in the structures of contempo-

rary societies and the openness of horizontal reciprocal adjustment

arrangements embodied in the governance framework. Many recent stud-

ies, however, take a more dubious tone and highlight the “ambiguities of

governance” (Bevir & Rhodes, 2016; Bozzini & Enjolras, 2012), taking

into consideration the many concrete obstacles to the changes which actu-

ally effect the transformation from government to governance, rather than

celebrating achievements. As it is noted in this literature, frictions, con-

flicts and the other resistances to change are systematic in governance

arenas as guiding values, goals, and the priorities of participants differ.

Moreover, these participants often belong to very distinct, specific, and

often conflicting institutionalized spheres of society (public, market, and

third sector). Therefore, both the public for-profit relationship and the pub-

lic nonprofit relationship have been studied by many authors. The rules

and regulations of different institutional contexts favor the profit or the

nonprofit sectors differentially. In Italy, this is particularly true at the local

level, where urban policies are closely monitored by private investors

(Eckardt & Elander, 2009), while social services rely to a large extent on

the resources made available by NPOs (Ranci, 1994, 2015).

Governance cannot be confounded with other dynamics such as the

quasi-market system (Trivellato, Bassoli, & Catalano, 2017) or the mere

interaction between public authorities and private actors (Capano, Howlett,

& Ramesh, 2015), or even with specific tools such as contracting-out (Or &

Aranda-Jan, 2017; Sørensen & Torfing, 2016). It is the government, indeed,

that defines the institutional setting for the “participation” of third parties,

and the nature, either cooperative or competitive, of the interactions with

them (Gasparre, 2012). Governance arenas are all but power-free, and par-

ticipation in networks or partnership arrangements usually clearly reflects

the unequal distribution of both the material and the nonmaterial resources

of the participants.

Against this background, in this article we offer a critical analysis of the

evolution of the relationships between the government and the third-sector

organizations in the Italian local welfare system over the last five decades and

Gasparre and Bassoli 929

argue that the broad idea of a shift “from government to governance” repre-

sents a blurred picture of what has really happened. We focus on the praxis of

participation, how these have changed over the years, and try to discriminate

between the form and the substance of the transformation, building on orga-

nizational change research. The analysis reveals that the third-sector organi-

zations had a vital role in the foundation of the Italian local welfare system,

far more crucial that the “government” label would suggest. With some

exceptions, however, their participation in the governance arenas of today

appears more illusionary than concrete. This has practical consequences for

public policy and management, as innovation in the welfare domain needs

authentic public–private partnerships (Ran & Qi, 2018), and genuine partici-

pation of civil society at all levels of social and political action.

In the “Theoretical Framework” section, we then briefly describe the

main frameworks used for the analysis of the relationships between the

government and the third-sector organizations; we outline their limits and

present an organizational perspective on the government–governance dyad,

providing a typology for the study of the change dynamics in an organiza-

tional setting such as a local welfare system. Then, we present the empirical

research carried out for the present study, the methodology adopted, and the

case selection undertaken (“Methodology and Case Selection” section).

The analysis is structured into four periods: the early stages of the founda-

tion of the Italian local welfare system, from the mid-seventies to the early

eighties (“Hidden Governance of the Seventies” section); the entrepreneur-

ial development of the welfare sector and the setting up of the first formal

arrangements for the design and delivery of local welfare services, from the

mid-eighties to the early nineties (“From NPOs to Social Enterprises” sec-

tion); the radical change in the logic of the relationship between the govern-

ment and the third-sector organizations that took place in the aftermath of

the economic and political crisis of 1992 to 2000 (“When Collaboration

Meets Competition” section); and then the last period, before and after the

global crisis of 2008 (“Back to ‘Government’” section). In relation to each

of these periods, we first focused on a specific local welfare system (that of

Genoa), which is featured in our empirical research, and then enlarged the

scope to Italy as a whole, building on the existing literature and the avail-

able research. In the last two sections, we discuss the four phases of devel-

opment of the Italian local welfare system in the light of our analytical

framework (“Discussion” section) and draw the conclusions from our work,

linking these thoughts to the current dialogue on governance in welfare

services. Finally, we outline future directions of research (“Conclusion”

section).