Social economy, innovative laboratory to drive growth and cohesion

After a long process of public consultation, the Italia government is preparing to approve the National Plan for the Social Economy. This is an act of great political significance, with which Italia joins the group of ten Member States that have already adopted a national strategy, as required by the European Recommendation of November 2023. Eleven others are preparing to do so in the coming months, completing the vigorous political action undertaken by the European Commission with the Social Economy Action Plan approved in 2021, itself the heir to a long process of cultural and political elaboration that began in 2011 with Commissioner Barnier's Social Business Initiative.

The paradox is that this important result is being achieved precisely at a time when an extraordinarily sudden reversal of the spirit of the times is causing the European Commission to hastily revise its priorities in the opposite direction, nullifying that precious political and cultural achievement that had led to the recognition of the value not only of the restorative, but also of the economic, productive and industrial value of the social economy. A recognition that culminated in the identification of the social and neighbourhood economy among the fourteen industrial ecosystems on which the Commission's new industrial strategy was based. The reorientation of European industrial policy priorities, in the wake of the Draghi Report, towards more traditional and muscular approaches, fuelled by the new popularity of rearmament and defence policies, makes it all the more important today for member states to adopt, with determination and adequate resources, political action to consolidate the social economy as a pivotal infrastructure for economic growth and social cohesion. A role that, in truth, should not be claimed, but simply noted, in light of the ample evidence showing, for example, that the social economy, with almost a thousand billion in turnover and 12 million employees, accounts for 6% of total employment and an estimated 6% to 7% of European GDP.

The National Plan amply recognises this role and, in terms of its breadth and ambition, is certainly adequate for the political mission to which it responds. If its implementation is equally incisive, the Plan could inaugurate a new generation of policies inspired by the virtuous synthesis between social cohesion and the country's economic development. In an era marked by growing inequalities, environmental crises and labour market transformations, the social economy represents a laboratory of economic and social innovation capable of combining the tools and logic of the market economy with the fundamental values of solidarity, cooperation, mutualism, reciprocity and volunteering.

In this workshop today, we face a challenge that is a very important part of the future European identity. The social economy is asked to be, in the first instance, restorative, i.e. to deal with people's needs and emergencies. Secondly, it is also asked to be a factor of production and a place for the creation of economic value. But, in addition to these two demands, a third and greater expectation is also growing today: that the social economy become a civil and democratic infrastructure and a guardian of economic pluralism. We expect, in short, a response to the crisis of imagination that, in the words of Cornelius Castoriadis or Mark Fisher, prevents us from seeing alternative institutional solutions and pushes us to consider inequalities and the deficit of social justice as natural and inevitable by-products of the economic system. As Gianluca Salvatori writes, the desocialisation and depoliticisation of society has created a representation vacuum that translates into the impossibility for institutions to determine the direction and goals of economic development. The role of the social economy and its protagonists is precisely that of reconstructing the underlying democratic political action, through a work of repair and reconstruction of trust, a sense of protagonism and participation in development.

Even with respect to its ability to be a place for imagining alternatives, the social economy has nothing to prove, because its history already includes some major radical innovations in the business model: the cooperative movement, social enterprise and mutual insurance. The latter, created to guarantee protection and security to its members through solidarity mechanisms, represent a historical form of social economy that is more relevant today than ever before. A form of enterprise that today claims for itself a central role in social economy plans, as widely recognised by the European Commission itself. Legitimately, because with 509 billion in premiums collected, mutual insurers today account for one third of the European insurance market, employing almost half a million people. Not-for-profit, mutuals operate in the interests of their members and promote equity in access to social protection, especially in areas such as supplementary healthcare and pension provision. In this sense, they play a role in repairing and reconnecting the social fabric, filling many gaps in welfare systems. For this reason, mutual insurers constitute a very important component of the economic system but also, in the sense described above, a fundamental civil and democratic infrastructure of representation of individuals and communities and of systemic response to needs, embodying the most profoundly political and institutional sense of the social economy.