Ready, Steady, Go? Obstacles to the Spread of Eco-Social Work Approaches: An Italian Case Study

Abstract

While eco-social work as a strategy that combines responses to environmental and social risks is gaining ground in Europe, it has not evenly spread across countries. This paper looks at Italy, a country in which eco-social work has arrived only recently and has found difficulty establishing itself, in order to understand the factors that have hindered and fostered its development. To do so, it explores two cases of eco-social innovation and, using a neo-institutionalist framework, the mechanisms at work in encouraging or impeding the establishment of eco-social work. The research suggests three mutually reinforcing obstacles to the spread of eco-social work in an Italian context: the limited space for eco-social work in the Italian policy agenda; the inability to reframe practices used by existing work integration initiatives; and the reproduction of established relationships between public and non-profit organisations in a competition for scarce resources.