New actors in multiagency settings to address, redress and prevent severe labor exploitation.

This contribution conceptualizes multiagency settings and methodologies in the context of labor exploitation. It draws from existing literature and from an empirical base that includes the experience of practitioners engaged in outreach social work in the anti-trafficking network in Northern Italy with partners and stakeholders during the FARm project, an EU co-funded project to create preventive networks against agricultural labor exploitation in Northern Italy (www.project-farm.eu). The project brough together a vast partnership of private, public, and non-profit agencies, in a co-construction of knowledge and interventions for the prevention, contrast and redressing of agricultural labor exploitation, previously documented (Zadra & Elsen, 2022, 2023; Zadra et al. 2022). This contribution focuses on delineating a methodological profile of multiagency work. On one hand, it underlines the contribution of outreach social workers to the multiagency context, the synergy and boundary work that this setting entails. Secondly, it explores the evolving dynamics of multiagency settings, expanding alliances with new social actors to build more comprehensive responses to severe exploitation, following the change of this phenomenon across different time periods and territorial contexts. Finally, it showcases the proposed conceptualization by documenting new forms of multiagency collaboration experimented by the anti-trafficking agencies in Northern Italy with universities and labor services during the FARm project.