WP 34 | 12 Innovative private-public partnerships
Italian social cooperation represents a unique model internationally both in terms of its historical evolution and the type of response it also offers to the employment needs of a given territory. The crisis in global markets has heavily affected the labor market, on the one hand, making it even more difficult for disadvantaged people to find new jobs and, on the other, creating new conditions of social fragility and thus new employment needs. While social cooperatives are a concrete way to respond to these emergencies, they often find themselves having to self-sustain in a highly competitive market with narrow profitability margins and restrictive spending policies.
Outside of these obstacles, they can represent to date “social engineering laboratories” (Bundey, 1971), where innovative and shared responses can be devised on the social inclusion needs expressed by a territory and a community.
