The marble cake of social services in Italy and Spain: Policy capacity, social investment, and the national recovery and resilience plans
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13882627231169266 |
| Author | Andrea Lippi,Andrea Terlizzi |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Social services as critical infrastructureGuest Editors: Renate Reiter and Tanja Klenk |
The marble cake of social
services in Italy and Spain: Policy
capacity, social investment, and
the national recovery and
resilience plans
Andrea Lippi
University of Florence, Italy
Andrea Terlizzi
University of Florence, Italy, Italy
Abstract
This article analyses the potential implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for the infrastructure of
social services in Italy and Spain. Drawing from the policy capacity framework and focusing on
childcare and elderly care, we investigate how the National Recovery and Resilience Plans are
likely to impact the core functions of the social investment approach. Through document analysis,
the article shows that, whereas the infrastructure of the social service system remains charac-
terised by a ‘marble cake’type of institutional arrangement combining national and subnational
responsibilities, attempts have been made by the central governments to steer the social invest-
ment policy capacity at the organisational and systemic levels. We argue that the pandemic repre-
sents a window of opportunity to rethink the overall system of intergovernmental relations in the
field of social services.
Keywords
Policy capacity, social investment, Italy, Spain, intergovernmental relations, COVID-19, social
services, National Recovery and Resilience Plans
Corresponding author:
Andrea Terlizzi, Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Florence, Via delle Pandette, 32 50127 Florence,
Italy.
Email: andrea.terlizzi@unifi.it
Special Issue: Social services as critical infrastructure
European Journal of Social Security
2023, Vol. 25(2) 178–195
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13882627231169266
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejs
Introduction
Global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic play a significant role in policy change (Peters et al.,
2011). The European Union (EU) responded to the pandemic crisis by approving Next Generation
EU (NGEU), a programme of unprecedented scope and ambition providing €750 billion to boost
growth, investments and reforms. The centrepiece of the NGEU programme is the Recovery and
Resilience Facility (RRF), a temporary financial instrument amounting to a total of €672.5
billion, set up to help repair the immediate economic and social damage brought about by the
COVID-19 pandemic. To access the RRF, EU Member States need to draft National Recovery
and Resilience Plans (NRRPs). The pandemic thus certainly opened a window of opportunity
for restructuring many policy sectors, including health and social services. Moreover, it has signifi-
cantly challenged intergovernmental relations, raising concerns about the distribution of responsi-
bilities, competences, and tasks between national and subnational levels of government (Capano
and Lippi, 2021; Casula et al., 2020; Mallinson, 2020).
This article analyses the potential evolution of social service infrastructure in the aftermath of the
COVID-19 pandemic in Italy and Spain, which are among the EU Member States most affected.
Social service delivery in the two countries is traditionally based on a scattered arrangement, char-
acterised by a combination of national and subnational responsibilities and by public and private
provision. Recent scholarship has investigated whether the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a
turn towards social investment (SI) in the two countries. For example, Guillén et al. (2022)
argue that the NGEU programme represents an opportunity for both countries to recalibrate their
welfare states, moving towards greater SI. Indeed, social policies, and particularly social services,
in both the Italian and Spanish NRRPs are mostly framed within a SI approach. Moreover, research
has explored the chances (and challenges) offered by the NRRPs to modernise public administra-
tion and increase administrative capacities (Di Mascio et al., 2022; Polverari and Piattoni, 2022;
Polverari and Seddone, 2022). This article joins this debate by analysing the role of national and
subnational governments in SI policies. In particular, by focusing on childcare and elderly care,
we adopt a policy analysis perspective to investigate whether and how the NRRPs in the two coun-
tries have impacted intergovernmental relations and the core functions of the SI approach.
The importance of SI in Italy and Spain stems from the multilevel system (Agranoff, 1990)
involving the state and local authorities, distributing a diverse set of tasks and duties among institu-
tions and sectors. This arrangement reflects a ‘marble cake’(Kropp and Behnke, 2016) approach to
intergovernmental relations. Unlike ‘layer cake’multilevel systems, where national and subnational
responsibilities are clearly delineated, ‘marble cake’systems display considerable overlapping and
sharing of responsibilities. Moreover, both Italy and Spain have a post-Napoleonic model of public
service (Kuhlmann and Wollmann, 2019), whose barycentre is located at the lowest level of the
system of intergovernmental relations, namely the municipalities, which are key actors in service
delivery. As such, SI capacity in both countries needs to be assessed with reference to a scattered
map of allocation of competences (Cf. Pierson 1995).
This article brings together the welfare state literature on SI and the literature on policy capacity.
These two fields of scholarship have rarely (if ever) been compared and combined. By adopting a
policy capacity approach (Brenton et al., 2022; Saddi et al., 2023; Wu et al., 2015, 2018) to the
study of SI, we aim to analyse the intergovernmental set of competences by which governmental
organisations perform SI functions with respect to two dimensions of policy capacity: analytical
and operational (Capano and Lippi, 2021, 2022; Denis et al., 2022; Wu et al., 2018). We believe
that such cross-fertilisation has much to offer with regard to advancing our understanding of
Lippi and Terlizzi 179
To continue reading
Request your trial