Labsus — Laboratorio per la Sussidiarietà
Labsus — the Laboratory for Subsidiarity — has spent two decades developing and advocating for "amministrazione condivisa" (shared administration), a framework in which citizens and local government enter formal collaboration pacts to co-manage common goods: parks, cultural spaces, social services, confiscated mafia properties, and other shared resources. The model is grounded in the Italian constitution's principle of subsidiarity and has been adopted by hundreds of municipalities, producing what Labsus calls a parallel governance layer — not replacing representative institutions but supplementing them with structured citizen co-management.
The organisation runs a university-accredited higher education course in shared administration (enrolling for 2026–2027), publishes a journal and research papers, and held the second edition of its Festival of Shared Administration in Assisi in March 2026. Labsus occupies an unusual space: neither a civic-tech platform nor a deliberative practitioners' network, but a legal-institutional innovation organisation — one that changed the law and the administrative practice, not just the conversation.
Links
- Website: labsus.org
See also
- Deliberative Democracy
- Participatory Budgeting
- Democracy Tools last_checked: "2026-08-09"