From Social Participation to the Civic Gift: The Geography of Blood Donation in Italy

This chapter examines the relationship between social participation, social capital and blood donation as a form of civic engagement in contemporary Italy. Drawing on the civic tradition of social capital, participation is conceptualised as a socially embedded process shaped by organisational infrastructures, institutional arrangements and territorial contexts. Particular attention is given to non-profit organisations as key intermediaries sustaining networks of cooperation, trust and reciprocity, and contributing to social cohesion and sustainability. Within this framework, blood donation is interpreted as a paradigmatic form of organised altruism and as an empirical expression of a “civic gift”. In the Italian context, it represents a link between associative participation and individual civic action, translating organisational infrastructures into repeated practices of giving. Unlike other forms of volunteering, donation involves a tangible contribution to collective well-being, mediated by institutional systems ensuring equitable redistribution. The empirical analysis, based on secondary data from the National and Regional Blood Centres, highlights territorial differences in donation patterns, reflecting uneven civic infrastructures and associational capacity. Focusing on the geography of donation, the chapter shows how participation is structured and unevenly distributed, and argues that civicness is a territorially embedded relational process through which solidarity is organised and reproduced.