I have recent concluded two projects:
It is a collaborative project funded by the Italian government through the 2022 PRIN (Projects of Relevant National Interest) call for two years (September 2023-September 2025). I am the principal investigator, leading the team at the Scuola Normale, while the other two teams are led by Michele Filippini (Università di Bologna) and Maria Chiara d’Errico (Università di Perugia).
ReFuture investigates the comeback of the need for political planning and its role in revitalising democratic governance. After decades in which politics was mainly interpreted as day-to-day administration, an era of impending emergencies requires to build new capacities: thinking about possible futures is key to maintaining democracy’s ability to act and plan vis-à-vis epochal challenges like climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. The decline in the planning capacity that has characterised Western democracies since the end of the 20th century appears to be replaced by a resurgence of the need for political planning, in many forms, including institutional responses in the form of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) programme and increasing focus of grassroots civil society actors both on proposing alternatives to institutions and the public, and on practicing such alternatives in prefigurative experiences.
ReFuture investigates this “return of the future” in the Italian case, through an interdisciplinary effort which includes intellectual and political history, economics, and social movement studies. Italy was one of most heavily affected countries in the world by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Italian government was among the chief proponents of the NGEU programme within the EU framework, and the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) launched in 2021 within this framework represents an intersection between the response to the pandemic crisis and the project of an “ecological transition” meant to address the climate emergency. Which forms is the return of the future, and thus the comeback of the most traditional democratic tool to address it (i.e. political planning), taking within the Italian political context? Our project aims to answer this question by focusing on three different spheres: the intellectual and political debate, state policy, and grassroots civil society. First, through the lenses of intellectual and political history, we will investigate the role of political planning in European liberal democracies in the first part of 20th century, its crisis in the neoliberal era, and its current state in the intellectual and political debate. Secondly, through the lenses of general equilibrium model, we will assess the impact of the planning policies put in place through NGEU and the NRRP on the institutions involved in addressing the pandemic and the ecological transition. Thirdly, through the lenses of social movement studies, we will analyse the visions of the future, planning practices, and prefigurative experiences of grassroots civil society actors vis-à-vis the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate emergencies. All in all, the project aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the way in which actors in the Italian society are developing tools to address the future in a context of impending emergencies, and of the potential of such tools for revitalising democracy.
It is a collaborative project funded by the Italian government through the 2022 PRIN PNRR (Projects of Relevant National Interest) call for two years. Louisa Parks is the principal investigator at the University of Trento, while I lead the team at the Scuola Normale.
The TRANSFORM project will investigate how civil society actors drive change towards transformative environmental governance. Current scholarship claims that such a change is a crucial element to improve our responses to climate change, biodiversity loss and the host of daunting challenges these pose. This viewpoint is shared by key actors in global environmental governance as well as civil society actors (CSAs), and all converge in underlining the need to shift away from the existing system of environmental governance rooted in understandings of the ‘environment’ as a set of resources. While emerging work on transformative environmental governance focuses on the fundamental elements that will characterise this governance model, there is less detail available about how such a transformation will come about. Although CSAs are seen as key drivers of transformative change, questions about how their actions will drive change remain. The TRANSFORM project will unpack how different CSAs are driving changes towards transformative environmental governance by conducting multi-method, holistic case studies of actors working towards such change at multiple levels of governance. It will focus on the Italian context and investigate cases at the local, national and international levels. It hypothesises, on the basis of the emerging literature, that CSAs of different types can challenge the overarching norms that currently shape environmental governance through bottom-up paths where they encourage and enact innovative changes to social-ecological systems, and through demands for change at multiple institutional levels.
Previous research projects:
- CLIMACT (Communication as Organization: Social Media and Grassroots Participation in Climate Action Mobilizations) on the relationship between social media and organisational practices of climate movements in Italy and Belgium. The project was co-directed by Marco Deseriis and me at the Scuola Normale Superiore (internal funding).
- DEMOS (Democracy in the EU and the Potential of a European Society) on grassroots alternative visions and practices of Europe. The project was directed by Donatella della Porta at the Scuola Normale Superiore (internal funding), and I was in charge of the case of labour mobilisation in Italy.
- Collective Action and the Refugee Crisis, on protests and initiatives in solidarity with asylum seekers. The project was directed by Donatella della Porta at the Scuola Normale Superiore (ERC funding), and I was in charge of the Italian case.
- LIVEWHAT project (Living with Hard Times – How Citizens React to Economic Crises and Their Social and Political Consequences), on the citizens’ responses to the economic crisis, coordinated by Marco Giugni (University of Geneva) and funded from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme. I worked on the Italian case under the direction of Lorenzo Bosi.
- “Memory in Action: Mediatised Public Memory and the Symbolic Construction of Conflict in Student Movements” (Ph.D. thesis, supervised by Donatella della Porta).
- “National report on students” (“Rapporto Nazionale sui soggetti in formazione”), commissioned by the Italian National Youth Forum (“Forum Nazionale dei Giovani”), c/o Office of the Prime Minister, Department of Youth (“Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, Dipartimento della Gioventù”).