Abstract

The article presents an analysis of the registry of welcoming families: a possible way to organize the hosting of refugees in Italy. The registry is structured from a call from the Public Entity in which citizens are invited to join a directory that gathers those who have offered to host refugees. This policy tool is often referred to by stakeholders as social innovation (SI). In the literature, IS is a multifaceted and changing concept, so we thought it appropriate to carry out a synthesis of the characters found in the literature by identifying six aspects necessary to define a practice as SI. These six aspects allowed us to operationalize the concept of SI. This approach was then tested on existing practices in Italy in order to assess whether or not they were a SI. Through 35 semistructured interviews, we were able to assess the experiences of six Italian municipalities, pointing out that the registry of welcoming families respects all the identified characteristics and can therefore be defined as a Social Innovation