Governance: an Essential Lever for Innovating Home Care services for the Elderly Through Co-Production. First Insights from the Evaluation of Three Years of Experimentation in Friuli Venezia Giulia

The paper presents a reflection on the role of governance in innovating home care services for elderly people, drawing upon the first insights of a qualitative evaluation research on the experimentation of an innovative model of home care service promoted by the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region to contrast the institutionalization of non-autonomous elderly people based on co-production and the personal budget. The results have highlighted the decisive function exerted by the governance system existing at the micro level in inducing the path dependence effects and the crucial role of the intermediate level of the governance system to prevent these effects from having distorting consequences. Moreover, what has emerged is the importance for governance to assume a participative configuration in order to balance adequately the necessity to guarantee equity with the strict adherence to the local context that characterizes social innovation as well as co-production.governance, co- production, social innovation elderly, home care.