Innovazione sociale, sviluppo economico e margini territoriali: una riflessione per il contesto italiano

The discussion about social innovation's agendas entails the understanding of context that increasingly necessitates new methodologies, aware of the limits unfolded by the traditional approaches to tackle wicked problems, scattered on a global scale. Amongst these, the polarization of structural conditions experienced by both the Italian and European middle class is a key theme which, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, represents a meaningful challenge to be addressed in the next future, and it is particularly relevant to when compared to polarization and territorial exclusion phenomena, usually related to weak analysis in terms of policy implications within a place-based framework. By taking into account this body of contextual elements, this paper aims at discussing a number of key themes in the field of social innovation: the complexity of defining “margins" in an appropriate territorial configuration, the me- thodological and organizational outline of social innovation, the elements fuelling or limiting the spread of new opportunities in marginal contexts, the relevant policy fields where to transform episodic projects into shared and diffused opportunities among diverse territorial contexts.