In Italy, as a consequence of Covid-19 and the European Recommendations for a more inclusive school system, a series of national attempts have developed to design systematic, ecologically based socio-educational programming (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) directed at pupils and their families, including the involvement of local authorities and the Third Sector.
The evolution of these policies over the years has changed setting several times for various reasons. The 2020-2021 School Plan of Ministry od Education codified community-basededucational pacts, leaving freedom of action to territorial negotiation and school autonomies.
The article mainly analyzes the next phase, which in correspondence with the NGEU, saw the Italian government as the protagonist of a new, centralist model, declined in the performance contract signed by individual school principals with the Ministry. Funds were provided directly and exclusively to educational institutions, with quite stringent constraints (expenditure maximums and minimums, recruitment procedures, categories of interventions, quantitative reporting with targets and milestones). In the Operating Instructions related to the funding, however, the Schools were asked to become a planning and connection hub through joint tables with social and health services, voluntary associations and the Third Sector. Effectively a central direction of the Ministry with a constrained responsibility of local direction to the Schools.

This new modality, however, has highlighted:

1) concrete difficulty in implementing existing territorial networks;

2) great difference between Schools, based on the management skills of the School Headmaster;
3) difficulty for Local Authorities to have visibility on the actions and pupils taken in charge, with a reduction in efficiency in planning their territorial policies;
4) tight timelines for design and implementation, with many cases of duplication of actions and adverse selection effects on participants;
5) difficulty in training teachers on anti-dropout issues, due to the rigidity of funding;
6) cutback on the national educational poverty fund;

This governance pattern has exhausted the frail apparatus of educational institutions (tested by precariousness and management of so many other PNRR funds) so much that the Third Sector has hardly been able to enter.
In parallel, the cut in the national fund has put at risk locally rooted projects (example: Con i bambini project), resulting in alarm among local authorities.

Given these difficulties, the article hypothesizes a possible future for territorial educational pacts, asking two questions: will simple technical-legal issues determine the future evolution foreseen for such planning? Are changes in macroculture located within a horizon of diffuse pedagogical culture (Tolomelli, 2020), educational ecosystems (Ellerani, 2022), diffuse educational ecosystems (Chianese, Bocchi, 2023)?

The article explores cause-effect connections in the evolution between regulatory policy acts, governance, and pedagogical theories. The research's limit lies in the extreme actuality of the process analyzed: there are still no qualitative analyses of the effects of these projects still being carried out in schools. Moreover the new National Fund for Educating Communities is still being defined and approved in Parliament.

A critically oriented theoretical research methodology will be used, which attempts to reconstruct the links between pedagogical theories, ministerial policy documents and the design of educational actions. The reflections will be enriched by references to concrete episodes of territorial educational alliances, linked to formally constituted networks, that have produced spin-offs inside and outside Italian schools. The main territorial observatory will be the context of the metropolitan city of Bologna, both because of the proximity of the field of observation with respect to the author of the article and because of the good local tradition of consultation and territorial agreements. Reference is made in the article to the Protocol of Agreement of the Municipality of Bologna with the city's comprehensive institutes and to phenomena such as the territorial network for the theatre La scena che educa signed by four Bologna institutes. For the sake of completeness of the analysis, it is doubtful that this type of agreement would have come into being even without a ministerial push at the connecting tables, precisely because of the territory's tendency to synergy between entities. For the methodology chosen, the most appropriate review seems to be a narrative one: specific texts are in fact selected that concern the theory and practice of territorial educational pacts against school drop-out. Within the ministerial documents dedicated to the topic, both the decrees and the guideline texts to the Schools will be taken into consideration, as well as the European Recommendations that have framed the introduction of new organisational and planning tools. Formal critical opinions expressed at parliamentary hearings by stakeholders in schools and pedagogy with respect to the most up-to-date proposal of territorial actions of the educating community will also be used to assess possible future developments of the educational macrosystem and its transformations.

The research advances the hypothesis that the limits of the previous approaches have emerged and that there is a move towards a mixed system, as provided for by number 28 Bill Fund for the support and development of the educating community, under discussion in the Italian parliamentary commissions. The following lines of action emerge from the text, which seems to have all the characteristics of a corrective rethink to overcome certain obstacles and limitations. In fact it is planned that - funds will be allocated to both municipalities and schools; - there will be an obligation to spend at least 50 per cent on actions co-designed with the Third Sector; - a National Observatory will be set up to monitor and coordinate non-formal education projects; It seems that the principles of the enlarged educating community and the educational alliance (Contini, 2012), the idea of extended educational experiences and the pedagogy of places (Zadra, 2022) have now been unequivocally affirmed, despite governance and platform revisions. The research therefore asks whether the governance problem can be solved simply by mixed model with mandatory participation criteria, or whether in fact the problem lies in the lack of a genuinely ecological pedagogical vision. The limitations of the research can be of two kinds: - the processes described are all still opened and the designs being developed or completed; - the difficulty in generalising observations, given the great heterogeneity of Italian realities both in terms of pedagogical vision and in terms of local welfare policies and organisations

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