Abstract

This paper has attempted to reconstruct how the Italian Welfare System (based on a ‘particularistic-clientelist’ and a ‘familistic’ Welfare State) has changed over the past decades. Until the 1990’s the ‘Voluntary Sector’ answered to the social needs disregarded by public policy (poverty, disability, childhood, family issues, drug addiction): in that period the strong growth of non profit organizations has been also characterized by a significant debate on the ‘political role’ of Voluntary organizations. In the last decades we have to highlight retrenchment policies above all in health care and in education; in addition the State is trying to ‘insitutionalize’ the Third sector, towards a new Welfare Mix where Voluntary Organizations, but above all Social Cooperatives and Social Enterprises, should play a more relevant and ‘substitutive’ role, especially in the provision of social services. Covid-19 effects will change these trends?