Abstract

The approval of the law reform of social services in Italy (Law No. 328/00) has fostered a new geography of welfare systems at local level. One of the main aspects of the law concerned the recognition of the nonprofit sector as a «second pillar» alongside public administrations, both to manage and plan social policies. Twenty years after the approval of this law, this paper tries to analyze the evolution of nonprofit institutions in the social services sector at regional level and to investigate the ways that these institutions adopt to build and manage relationships with a plurality of stakeholders. The aim of the analysis is to understand how local welfare models still constitute a matrix of policies and projects in which it is possible to recognize the impact of nonprofit institutions. The learnings from this twenty-year history of partnership between public and private-social sector can be particularly useful in a phase where both social protection systems and civil society actors are called to respond to new societal transformations that probably may change their organizational structures and operating methods.