The New Partnership: The Changing Relationship between State and the Third Sector in the Scenario of New Social Policies in Italy

Abstract

The second half of the 1980s and the 1990s will be remembered in Italy as the period in which privatization assumed increasingly significant proportions as the dominant political strategy in the field of welfare policies (Pasquinelli, 1993). The move towards privatization has been drastic and generalized. It has radically reversed the tendency to extend government intervention that had characterized the growth of the Italian welfare system since the end of the World War II. Until the 1970s, politicians had not only acquiesced to the expansion of welfare spending but had encouraged it. Nevertheless, during the last decade the worsening of fiscal problems and growing political instability (the result of scandals caused by investigations into political corruption) weakened the social consensus surrounding the welfare state and gave room to proposals for radical change (Borzaga et al., 1996).