From public and corporate to territorial and collaborative: Welfare needs a change of pace

29 giugno 2026/ByGiovanni Fosti Veronica Vecchi

If we look at welfare through the lens of social cohesion, the picture appears rich in actors and initiatives. Yet inequality and poverty continue to grow within our communities. Neither public intervention nor the increasing commitment of businesses through corporate welfare programs and give-back initiatives is proving capable of reversing a trend that is becoming increasingly alarming.

Public welfare is showing ever more evident limitations. The problem lies not only in the scarcity of resources but also in organizational rigidity, which reduces its ability to respond to the increasingly diverse needs of today's communities. The private sector, too, while offering meaningful examples of corporate welfare and give-back initiatives (often, and somewhat improperly, grouped under the umbrella of CSR), needs a stronger strategic vision to turn these efforts into a genuine driver of social value creation.

Against this backdrop, the focus shifts from the providers of welfare to its beneficiaries, highlighting the risk that systems designed to reduce inequality may ultimately end up reinforcing it. This dynamic affects both the public and the private sectors. Public systems tend to concentrate their interventions either on people facing the most severe forms of vulnerability or on those who have the capacity to make their voices heard. Private systems, by contrast, oscillate between captive offerings presented as welfare but often more legitimately and effectively aligned with human resources or marketing objectives (the so-called corporate welfare models), and niche initiatives that are highly effective but lack the critical mass needed to generate systemic change.

Education and healthcare, the two foundational pillars of citizenship as it has developed in Italy, are the areas where we should begin to foster convergence. Consider employer-sponsored childcare centers, for example. Large companies can afford them; small businesses, retail stores, and professional practices cannot. Municipalities, acting alone, struggle to provide widespread, diversified childcare services that are competitive in both quality and pricing while remaining sustainable over time. Yet solutions already exist in pilot initiatives: Large companies are opening unused childcare slots to the employees of companies in their supply chains or to small businesses in the surrounding area. This is a public-private-territorial alliance (or 4P—plural public-private partnership) built around a community service, using a multiplier approach that transforms corporate welfare into territorial welfare while shoring up reputation and resilience across the value chain.

Now consider healthcare. Waiting-list times vary, and not only across regions and local contexts. In fact, people living in the same area can have very different levels of access to healthcare services. On one side are public welfare models, rooted in local communities, struggling to meet the needs of an aging population that naturally necessitates more extensive and complex healthcare protection. On the other side are corporate welfare systems whose priorities and incentive structures are entirely disconnected from public welfare.

Investing in efforts to harmonize public and private resources—financial, material, and organizational—and integrate them intelligently, avoiding overload in the public sector and fragmentation in the private sector: this is one of the major challenges of ensuring sustainable welfare and social cohesion in the years ahead.

The issue is collaborative territorial welfare, made possible through partnerships with flexible, pluralistic configurations involving multiple stakeholders. But partnerships are complex, difficult, and costly. To ensure that calls for this kind of collaboration don’t go beyond wishful thinking, we need to adopt the perspective of potential partners and provide answers to several practical questions:

Vision and incentives
Territorial alliances
Skills and capabilities

Vision and incentives: beyond reporting

Why should companies embrace this approach? Because paying attention to the social cohesion of the territory in which they operate affects several aspects of corporate life.

First, there is an issue of identity. Does the company see itself merely as part of an economic system, or as an element of the broader territorial system? as a “black box,” or as a market actor whose competitive capacity contributes to the opportunities available in the surrounding community, and in turn, draws strength from the territory in which it grows? Around this question of identity, as we know, social responsibility, HR management, and marketing either intersect or remain sharply separate.

Second, there is the issue of incentives. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) provides a regulatory framework that makes it mandatory to report impacts on communities, and this represents an initial incentive. But stopping there would be reductive. The literature clearly shows that companies that invest in effective welfare programs have better organizational climates, higher engagement, and lower turnover. So the intrinsic incentive already exists; what’s missing is external recognition. ESG ratings still measure the social dimension through now well-established indicators such as gender equality and pay equity, which represent a baseline rather than an endpoint. The time has come for a qualitative leap: Companies should be assessed on their ability to generate welfare impacts in their territories through plural partnerships and shared initiatives. Nor should we overlook the financial and tax incentives that governments provide to businesses. These too should be modernized, looking beyond financial statements and toward a company’s capacity to act as a central player in territorial systems.

Territorial alliances: from local actors to the financial system

Public institutions and socially responsible businesses can create new equilibria, in which the resources and expertise of each contribute to a welfare model situated between public welfare—whose universalistic ambitions are becoming increasingly difficult to fulfill—and private, corporate welfare, which is reserved for working citizens and their families.

The risks associated with this type of collaboration also require financial instruments capable of absorbing fluctuations in demand, integrating the contributions of the business sector on one hand and the financial system on the other. The latter can play an unprecedented and decisive role in this field. In fact, with direct access to large corporations as well as SMEs, banks and institutional investors are in an ideal position to promote collaborative welfare initiatives and support companies in co-design processes. In sum, we need a new approach, one that is far more strategic and ambitious than current rating systems can capture, going far beyond what social finance or the “S” dimension of finance currently delivers.

The missing capabilities

The rarity of these initiatives is also due to the lack of implementation capacity. The public sector must learn to view private actors not as outsourcers for certain welfare programs, but as genuine partners in the co-production of collective goods. The financial system must develop capabilities in territorial facilitation and impact assessment. Businesses must evolve their corporate welfare programs and philanthropy toward systemic approaches. And all stakeholders—large and small companies, financial institutions, and public administrations—must develop a new culture of partnership: not the episodic project-based logic of traditional CSR, but a systemic commitment that can no longer be postponed.

As a school of management, SDA Bocconi places these hybrid capabilities at the center of its programs. We believe they are essential for building corporate, public, and territorial systems that are stronger because they are more collaborative.

The topics covered in the “Housing” Trending Topic are addressed in the executive education programs Partnership pubblico-privato per investimenti e servizi and PPP per investimenti e servizi pubblici , and are studied by SDA Bocconi’s Public Value Lab and Business & Government Lab .