The Evolution of Inter-Organisational Urban Networks to Face Poverty in Education. The REACT Experience

This paper focuses on local networks of agents operating to counteract education dropouts. We use the opportunity of data collection organized for monitoring a national project named REACT to investigate how inter-organisational partnerships might counteract education poverty. We describe the structure and features of operational and institutional networks in eight socio-economically deprived neighbourhoods located in four Italian cities. Examining the evolution of networks over time (before and after the intervention), we ask whether the active promotion of networks increases their role and effectiveness. We observe that both operative and institutional networks involved agents from different social domains; an encouraging result that states the need for composite skills and resources to deal with school dropouts. In addition, all entities involved in these networks played similar roles with no hierarchy; therefore, the networks showed a lack of governance leading to weak embeddedness. The REACT project seemed to be successful in enabling networking; in all urban neighbourhoods, the presence of private-sector organizations in networks increased and they became denser. Nonetheless, no cohesion among entities was created, and embeddedness is still lacking. Overall, our results suggest a lack of governance in local networks fighting school dropouts and call for future attention to this area when promoting education communities.