Partnership, Social Capital and Good Practices Among Public, Private and the Third Sector

The conceptual framework underlying this paper is based on three key concepts: partnership, social capital and good practices. The term “partnership” refers to a structural configuration characterized by the co-presence of different social subjects and reciprocal and collaborative social action that seeks to achieve project goals and is based on the implementation of medium term relations. Social capital, according to the relational approach, consists of the ability to create cooperative relations based on trust in order to pursue a common good. The spirit of solidarity, relation-centered aid between the service provider and client together with interpersonal trust make the third sector a privileged environment of social capital generation. The concept of “good practices” has entered the language of social policy, to indicate a concrete benchmark of reference in social intervention evaluation. A model for the evaluation of the quality of welfare that considers these three concepts is proposed.