Inclusive education is a key aspect of the European Disability Strategy 2010–2020. The aim of this study is to give voice to three local organisations of people with disability and for people with disability in Spain, Lithuania and Greece, discussing the EU policy for inclusive education in relation to personal experiences and national policies, as part of the Able’20 European project. The points of view of 58 young people with disabilities were collected through the ‘theatre of the oppressed’ approach as an emancipatory disability research tool, aiming at the empowerment of young people with disabilities and their organisations. The voices of young people show the presence of physical barriers alongside more challenging cultural and institutional barriers, which strongly limit access to inclusive education, showing an opposite trend to the EU policy, and overshadowing the social model of disability.

Several grassroots initiatives in the last two decades have shown the need for different food practices that should be locally based and founded on ethical goals of social and environmental justice. Among the many “alternative food networks”, the Community Supported Agriculture model is particularly significant and interesting. By redefining meanings and social norms around food practices, this model actualizes significant processes of food re-socialization and re-territorialization. Focusing on Italy, this study aims to contribute to the understanding of the potential of this model. It does so through two investigations carried out in 2019 and 2020, aimed at analyzing, respectively, structural and organizational aspects of CSAs and the features of resilience shown by these initiatives during the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. On the whole, the two surveys give us the image of a radically innovative experience, potentially capable of deeply redefining production and consumption practices, being rooted in socially-shared knowledge, motivations, willingness, commitment and sense of community. In addition to being characterized by a determination to pursue sustainability and equity goals, the model shows a remarkable character of resilience thanks to the original arrangements that the common value basis and the strong sense of interdependence and solidarity of its members can provide.

Social farming (SF) has emerged as a social innovation practice shaping heterogeneous approaches and results. This study discusses the complexity of SF policy and practices, and it is led by the main hypothesis that the relationship between agricultural and social dimensions might be very heterogeneous, not only in different national contexts but also within the same national and local level. SF policy and practices are investigated testing the hypothesis of three main different modalities of interaction according to how the social and the agricultural perspectives interact. In the first, social target is not involved in the production system of the farm and the farm is the context where actions and measures of a social nature take place. In the second type of interaction, the farm employs the beneficiaries in some of its production activities collaborating with the social services. The third is where the farm organizes its activities to actively employ targeted people to enhance their social inclusion and integration in the community. Italian SF policy and practices are analyzed as case study, through the lens of sociological critical discourse analysis regarding the regional regulatory documents, and interviews for local case studies. The results of the study show that SF policy and practices might be very heterogeneous also within the same national and local level, outlining different hybridization of social and agriculture actions that can be properly analyzed through the three SF model proposal. This study contributes to the broader debate on the various dimensions of sustainability, suggesting the need for further research on the efficiency of SF as local development model sustainable in economic, social and environmental terms.

Social work in Europe is facing numerous challenges in terms of promoting the participation of migrants and their descendants in super-diverse societies. This study investigates collaboration between social workers and intercultural mediators based on international debate and fieldwork in Italy. Does social work require collaboration with other professions specialised in intercultural relations? What are the characteristics of intercultural professionals? What are the pros and cons of collaboration between social workers and intercultural mediators? This study shows that local social services need to work with intercultural mediators, allowing local social services to implement various strategies for tackling cultural and linguistic barriers with their clients and rely on professionals inside or outside their own. Furthermore, intercultural mediators tend to have weak and heterogeneous training backgrounds and working conditions. This article aims to contribute to the debate on the welfare reform process to support migrants and their descendants’ equal rights and participation in society, highlighting the need for collaboration between interculturally aware social workers and intercultural mediators to tackle institutional structural weaknesses in such professions as part of an organisational innovation process in social-welfare institutions.

The integration of welfare services in activation policies has been one of the common answers to welfare challenges in EU member states over the last two decades. The process has been interwoven with the rescaling both downwards and upwards of welfare regulative authorities. The article discusses the role of integrated services in activation policies in relation to the centralisation and decentralisation of welfare policies in a comparative perspective of different EU welfare regimes and highlights the role of local institutional milieus in shaping path-dependent modes of governance in integrated services.

COVID-19 has highlighted strengths and weaknesses in healthcare systems all over the word. Despite the differences in primary care models in Europe, this study investigates the state-of-the-art of general practitioners (GPs) before the COVID-19 pandemic spread as a result of the reform process of the previous two decades. The GPs numbers over 100,000 inhabitants has been considered as a proxy of public health investment in GPs. Is the number of GPs increased or decreased in the last 20 years of reform processes in European countries? The main hypothesis is that European healthcare systems would have increased the number of GPs coherently with WHO recommendations. Comparative data on the number of GPs per 100,000 inhabitants in 21 European countries are investigated between 1995 and 2014 (the last available data). Data show that the number of family doctors over 100,000 inhabitants in European countries has increased over the last 20 years, except for Italy, where it has strongly reduced. Primary care has had a crucial role in managing the pandemic. Results of this study suggest that a country such as Italy, which has not invested in family doctors in the last two decades, would have been less equipped to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.