Quale governance locale per quale innovazione sociale? Apprendimenti intorno a un progetto sperimentale sulle politiche familiari a Modena, interrotto dalla pandemia : Understanding the nexus between local governance and social innovation: Evidence from an Italian study on family policies, with an ex-post COVID-19 interference

This paper stems from the «Progetto Pilota Natalità» in the province of Modena of the Emilia-Romagna region, Italy. Run between 2019 and 2021, the project introduces new evidence related to family policies in the Province of Modena. Specifically, we integrate primary qualitative firm-level evidence gathered during the Covid-19 pandemic with data on the voluntary organizations operating in the Italian third sector obtained just before the Covid-19 outbreak. We provide meaningful insights at the intersection of the public, the private and the voluntary sectors, while setting some guidelines to move forward in the design and implementation of family policies that are sensible across the territory. The study is interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic and, as a result, is mainly centered around two themes: (1) the processes involved in the territorialization of public policy, particularly family policies, that entail local collective action levers and bottom-up resilience for the application of national policies; (2) the potential of these policies in terms of social innovation, understood as the joint design of a social infrastructure within a value allocation process between the actors involved, given certain time and space aspects. The paper explores the dimensionality of social innovation through the emergence and the scaling up of innovative processes as a result of devolved governance from national and EU levels to the local level, which gives precisely the framework of this study.