The Territorialisation of Local Welfare: Changes in Governance’s Organizational and Planning Models. The Case of the Lombardy Region

In 2015 the Lombardy Region (Regione Lombardia), the richest and most populous Italian region, licensed a systemic reform of its welfare state, which has substantially changed the governance of the social-healthcare system. This reform involved (directly and indirectly) also the organizational dimension of a peculiar form of governance arena that is the Area Social Plan (Piano di Zona, PdZ), which is a governance instrument that allows municipalities to plan in an associate dimension the production and the supply of social services. These governance changes are the organizational answers to the need to rationalize and improve the system’s efficiency and to strengthen the proximity between citizens/users and welfare services (the last is a strategic goal, as stated by the theoretical approach of the social investment in contemporary welfare systems). This path seems to institutionalize the emerging role of the so called welfare mix model, that entails a new governance pattern based on horizontal relationships between the actors (both public and private). In this paper we will analyse the ideas and the institutional/organizational provisions which characterized the Lombardy welfare until 2015, and the changes which have occurred after the 2015 structural reform. So, the paper aims is to inquire the connections between these systemic changes, how these changes influence the planning phase of the welfare provision and how the complexity of the territorial social needs imposes a move towards a more participatory model of local welfare; a model based on a new system of territorial authoritative devolution and a new governance model which shapes a decentralized welfare Regional system, built upon a nested and complex system of actors and governance interactions. In order to accomplish this task, we have chosen to apply a qualitative methodology based on an in depth interviews with different actors. The selected actors are: the high rank officials of the Lombardy Region, mayors, the main stakeholders which act in the system (profit and non-profit associations which are part of the local welfare net), Municipalities' officials and Area Social Plans and a group of socio-healthcare Directors of the newly created Regional territorial agencies (ATS and ASST). This kind of in depth interviews will allow us to reconstruct the organizational framework which is at the base of the Lombardy system of welfare and to obtain a valuable interpretation of the systemic changes introduced by the 2015 reform.