Sussidiarietà, Identità e Governance comunitaria

Community governance stands beside the Market and the State not as a residual choice of governance, but with equal dignity. Being a spontaneous and “natural” way to solve coordination problems, it has, first, a logic and, then, a historic primacy on the others. In this paper we analyze areas of application, features and limits of systems of governance based on the recognition of identity. We highlight that elements of Community governance are common to settings as diverse as firms and systems of regulation on the use of common pool resources. In a perspective based on subsidiarity, we then propose a taxonomy of governance systems based on the level of centralization of decisions and on the extent of recognition of identities. Finally, we suggest that the acknowledgement of the role played by Community governance provides us with a different reading key of what is meant by Social market economy and of the European economic model as a whole.