Opening the Black Box of the Social Investment Welfare State: An Analysis of the Youth Guarantee in Italy

In literature, the recalibration of social policies toward the Social Investment (SI) perspective has often been illustrated by looking at the shifts in the level and composition of expenditures from policies covering "old risks" to policies addressing "new social risks".

Although these studies are useful to grasp the "general picture", they provide a rather simplistic depiction of SI welfare state regimes.

In this paper we try to move a step further by focusing on a dimension which has received little attention in SI literature: the operational governance of investment-oriented policies. Our argument is that the analysis of governance structures and implementation arrangements could add new insights into the tensions and problems which can arise in the "real world of the SI welfare state" despite the availability of financial resources and the rechanneling of expenditures.

Based on interviews of key stakeholders and the analysis of official documents, our paper traces the implementation process of the Italian Youth Guarantee (YG) program. The YG is a policy strategy strongly consistent with the SI paradigm, which aims at promoting the insertion of young NEETs into the labour market or an educational path. Given that Italy, like other Latin countries, can be considered a SI welfare state laggard, the implementation of the YG represents an interesting field of research for the analysis of social investment measures "at work". Our aim is to show how specific governance arrangements and implementation practices can challenge the too often "taken for granted" social investment character of policies strategies.