Blood Donations

The chapter examines blood donation as a distinctive form of altruism and civic engagement that sustains social bonds and signals bridging social capital. It reviews classic and contemporary debates on giving, prosocial and personal norms, and the organisational-policy architecture that governs donation, indicating how anonymity, regulation and indirect reciprocity differentiate blood from conventional gift exchange while connecting it to civicness and shared responsibility. Empirically, the chapter assembles and harmonises secondary evidence from national and regional transfusion authorities, integrating regional and provincial series to describe territorial patterns and long-term dynamics. The analysis points to persistent yet shifting geographies of participation, with consolidation in several centre-south areas alongside stability or mild decline in parts of the north, and it notes exemplary local ecosystems in which associations, institutions and educational networks appear to cultivate sustained engagement. The chapter’s contribution is to connect theory, institutions and territory within a single framework, outlining how organisational infrastructures and civic norms may translate individual altruism into collective capacity. It ends by identifying place-aware implications for practice and setting an agenda to examine how organisational arrangements interact with local contexts to sustain participation.