LOCAL SOCIAL INITIATIVES DURING PANDEMIC TIMES. How governance change: Italian cases compared

Starting by the common thought that every disaster (natural and anthropic) brings to additional exclusions, the paper anaylses new social exclusion and poverty created by covid-19 pandemics and how local comunities in Turin and Naples dealt with them. Main research questions are: Which instruments and local initiatives did the public and third sector implement to fight exclusion and poverty? Did they give birth to emerging social practices and new governance models? The comparison concerns: initiatives to support excluded and fragile population and increase local resilience during covid 19: stakeholders' involvement, target population, and size; strategies, organisational principles, and type of leadership. It proposes the following questions: 1. Are there recurrent patterns of approaches and instruments? 2. Did these initiatives meet target groups needs? Results show that In Turin, municipality has a more coordinating role compared to Naples, whereas neighbourhoods' level bodies (municipalità) have a more active role. In Naples , the initiatives are mainly voluntary and based on charity or crowdfunding . They were all conceived at the beginning of the first wave, but without financial support did not continue in the second-third waves. No clear image of the real impact these initiatives have in local welfare systems. In Turin, the support of financial institutions and foundations guarantees the survival and the implementation. In this emergency, the informal sector was not able to affirm its presence, while usually in the past it was the only one able to survive.