Youths and Social Innovation in the Inner Areas of Southern Italy: Between Isolation and Solidarity

In the inner areas of South Italy, affected by depopulation and a lack of essential services in healthcare, education and transportation, social innovation processes initiated by youth organisations can serve as a vanishing point from which new sustainable, egalitarian and inclusive perspectives of participatory governance, good practices, projects and medium- to long-term visions may emerge. These processes are capable of generating forms of solidarity and social love where youths act as socially supportive actors, considering social innovation as a set of ‘bottom-up initiatives, responding to emerging social needs or instances, initiating paths of collaboration and community participation, while fostering skills, diverse competences, and individual and collective knowledge’ (Moralli, 2019).

This paper aims to explore social innovation processes and narratives driven by youths in the inner areas of Southern Italy through a multi-sited ethnography. The goal is to observe social innovation practices in both offline and online contexts, to understand how community engagement promoted by young people within the framework of social innovation, constitutes a strategy for cultivating meaningful connections, fostering mutual support, solidarity and promoting social inclusion in fragile and marginalized areas.