Policy integration in practice: evidence from anti-poverty policy in Italy

Abstract

In Italy, over the last few years, policy to combat poverty has been designed assuming that the integrated provision of social and employment services should represent one of the essential conditions (a minimum standard) of the policy. Since ‘integration does not just happen by design’, what happens when an integrated policy approach is put into practice? Using some of the main evidence of a recent survey on more than 400 Local social planning authorities (local institutions responsible for coordinating social policies) an index of service integration has been developed in order to analyze and measure the capacity of local administrations to deal with the paradigm of coordination and integration.