Accounting for the Varieties of Volunteering. New Global Statistical Standards Tested

Worldwide, studies on volunteering have for a long time suffered from the weak consensus on what volunteering is and the lack of globally standardized data. International Labour Office in 2011 and United Nations in 2017 have provided global statistical standards for organized and direct volunteering with the potential to allow for comparability. Are these standards actually fit to account for the differences of the world and advance knowledge? Unique in its genre, the book addresses the methodological challenges of new global statistical standards on volunteering. Beyond illustrating which innovations they bring and critically assessing the existing tensions between the global standards and local differences, the book shows how the ILO and the UN guidelines can be implemented into national statistics and which new advancements in the understanding of contemporary volunteering they allow, namely about characters, antecedents and impacts of formal and direct volunteering. This multidisciplinary 14 chapters book also provides tools and inspiration for practitioners and policy-makers for better supporting the contribution of citizens to the common good Based on the partnership between official statistics, academia and practitioners, the book takes Italy as illustrative case. Italy is the unique country in the world in having official data on volunteering coherent with the updated statistical guidelines and is an excellent test-bed to evaluate their performance in accounting for the varieties of volunteering because of its domestic diversity.