Social Enterprise in Public Governance. The Early Stage for the Romanian Case

Social enterprise is considered a viable alternative in satisfying social needs and an essential actor within the process of reforming and developing the public sector. The hybrid type of organization (adopting business methods to satisfy social needs) characterizes the social enterprise as a complex entity at the cross-roads of public, private and non-profit sectors. Therefore, debates on specific paradigms for social enterprises were extremely challenging for scholars. The main paradigms identified within the literature were the New Public Management (the British literature) and the Public Governance (the Italian literature). This paper adopts the paradigm of public governance. The main argument is that public governance paradigm reveals the necessity of elaboration and reconsideration of previous public policies, by developing innovative relational models in cooperation with the third sector (Meneguzzo et al. 2006). In this regard, authors address to the problem of insufficient interest of the Romanian local public authorities in involving social enterprise in local governance. The paper aims at a) demonstrating that there is a strong connection between local governance and social enterprise and b) identifying the current stage of interconnecting local governance and social enterprise in Romania. Firstly, there will be elaborated an analysis of literature and specific studies and reports at E.U. level on four important dimensions – policy dialogue, producing and providing public goods and services, finances and social matters. Secondly, there will be elaborated an analysis of the current legislative directions applied to the intervention of social enterprise at local level, related to the four dimensions mentioned-above. Thirdly, the authors should be able to contribute with important discussions on how social enterprise can represent a key-actor in public governance strategies. The research methodology consists of both qualitative and quantitative methods, by analyzing the documents, reports and data within the public governance and social economy/enterprises domains