Alessandro Sancino

The capacity of public organizations to address public problems effectively is under growing pressure due to government overload and the growing complexity of societal challenges (Head 2022; Nabatc...

Il volume presenta i risultati di un progetto di ricerca nazionale (PRIN) che mira ad esplorare il tema dell’innovazione sociale aperta in Italia attraverso l’analisi di sedici casi virtuosi. Il volume evidenzia iniziative multi-attoriali, caratterizzate da condivisione di risorse e collaborazioni tra attori pubblici, privati e della società civile per soddisfare bisogni di comunità e territori in cui si radica l’intenzionalità ad impatto sociale. Il volume si articola in quattro aree tematiche: governance pubblica, finanza sostenibile, imprenditorialità e misurazione dell’impatto sociale, offrendo un’analisi approfondita e comparativa dei casi con riflessioni teoriche e operative.

This editorial introduces the Special Issue on public value, urging scholars to ask fundamental questions about what public value organizing entails. It proposes key conceptual dimensions to foster public value thinking, highlighting the contested nature of the concept and the subjective understanding of public value among different publics. Themes emerging from the contributions to the Special Issue include re-imagining the State’s role in post-capitalistic regimes, re-designing approaches to economic planning, and re-experiencing public value through transforming relationships between planners and the planned, practicing active citizenship endeavors, and integrating environmental concerns into processes and systems of valuation. Problematizing the neoliberal misrecognition of the State as a legitimate institution for wealth creation, this special issue showcases its key role in fostering post-capitalist possibilities. The articles offer evidence and inspiration regarding innovating the ways we plan, design, produce and account for public value by leveraging what we conceptualize as new collaborative governance possibilities. Overall, we call for establishing stronger connections between existing studies on alternative economic, political, and democratic organizing with scholarship on public policy, strategic public management, transformative social innovation and social movements. Four areas for future research on post-capitalist governance are also proposed: State-businesses relationships beyond capitalism; changing conceptions of value including the value of care; municipal approaches toward community wealth building; re-imagining new public institutions for more participatory democracy.

This essay embraces a notion of critical scholarship concerned with proposing normative and actionable alternatives that can create more inclusive societies and focuses on the role of institutionalizing experimental places for inclusive social innovation as a bottom-up strategic response to welfare state reforms. By mobilizing the notions of utopias and heterotopias in Foucault, the paper sheds light on the opportunity to move from policy utopias to democratic heterotopias, discussing the politics embedded in this cognitive shift and the democratic nature of social innovation changing social and governance relations by interacting with politico-administrative systems. Some obstacles to institutionalizing social innovation are highlighted, as well as some key governance mechanisms that can be activated either by public and/or social purpose organizations to try to overcome those obstacles. Finally, we discuss the importance of linking inclusive social innovation with democratic, rather than market logics.