Governare l'economia collaborativa per produrre inclusione: attori, strumenti, stili di relazione e problemi di implementazione

After the economic crisis started in 2008 and the following wave of public expenditure retrenchment in many European countries (especially in the Southern area), the capacity of cities to enable their local systems to attract economic and social resources has become crucial. Among the cities that showed this capacity, Milan is a relevant case. The Milan center-left administration has inaugurated a new approach to foster local economic development and to tackle unemployment based on sharing and collaborative policies. In this paper we present the results of a research program started in 2015. We have analyzed all the ‘strategy’ documents presenting a vision of the future city, and interviewed the main stakeholders, in public and private organizations. A neo-institutional theoretical framework helped us to focus on the tension of coordination, especially between the city and the region, and between the city and the national government. The force of collaborative and cooperative ties at the micro and meso levels has been a source of innovation and deliberate change, but limited and challenged by tensions coming from the macro level. The experience reconstructed in this paper highlights the strengths but also the limitations of the city approach, which has proved effective in including new actors but that, in the presence of not coordinated actors and with a low institutionalization of their capacity for collective action, shows some difficulties in the implementation phase.