L’innovazione nell’accesso ai servizi di base. Un’analisi comparata delle policy di alcuni paesi europei

The limitation of rights in terms of access to essential services and job opportunities is one of the major problems of peripheral areas and has recently become the focus of policies produced across different scales of governance, starting, as is known, from the European one (the reference is clearly to the Cohesion Policy). The EU interprets the accessibility to basic services as a prerogative for the enjoyment of the citizenship right, as explained in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which became legally binding on the EU institutions and on national governments in 2009 with the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty. The goal is to increase prospects for inhabitants of lagging areas, with the ultimate objective of removing economic and social imbalances and supporting the effective fulfilment of human rights. This paper aims at contributing to the debate in this field. After highlighting the findings of the literature review and various organization positions and interventions on it, it examines the policies of some European countries (Italy, Germany and France) concerning the access to essential services in a comparative perspective and through a policy-oriented approach. To this end, it pays special attention to those cases in which the effect of innovation – understood here in its broadest sense – in improving the supply of services of general interest is more directly detectable. It ultimately provides an understanding of the governance models resulting from the type of innovation that is meant to be fostered and of the extent to which they can affect the inertial dynamics of the local systems on which policy interventions are to be implemented.