“Italy in substitute: it has great potential but it’s stuck”. The Report on the country’s objectives

A country in place: a cyclist with great potential but entirely concentrated on remaining balanced on the spot, rather than launching himself towards the future that awaits him, thus dispersing his strength. Is this the image focused by Generative Italy reportcurated by the Center for the Anthropology of Religion and Generative Studies (ARC) of the Catholic University of Milan with the support of the Unipolis Foundation and promoted by the Comm.On association, Generatività.it and the Alleanza per la Generatività Sociale.

A work that today is presented in the Senate, with Graziano Delrio, and which examines the social and economic dynamism of the Italian context, in comparison with the European countries. The aim is to highlight the areas of opportunity and blocks of development within our society: to do this we have moved along the relational guidelines of intergenerationality, complexity and contribution.

A substitute company

The image is precisely that of a substitute country, an Italy in which a large part of the energies – public and private – are engaged in an attempt to maintain the position, rather than in building a desirable tomorrow. A country committed to remaining balanced, but with little projection towards the future. And even less towards the new generations.

This situation must be unlocked by regenerating suitable conditions to favor the leap forward. Becoming a more mature and aware of its history. And for this very reason more capable of focusing on real priorities.

The generative analysis model

Social generativity offers a new perspective in reading the economy and society, their relationships and their developments. By insisting on the need to adopt a broader, more integrated and prospective gaze on reality, it allows us to recover the procedural and intertemporal dimension, and to assume a non-linear, i.e. complex, vision of life.

In this way, generativity warns us: if we want to address the nodes that block the dynamism and initiative of the different social actors, sectoral and short-term approaches. At the method level, what is urgently needed is a new, integrated way of conceiving, designing, implementing and evaluating policies. With respect to the objectives, it is necessary to invest in processes that are effectively transformative over time, within the framework of a long-term vision for the country.

Freeing generativity to untie 5 knots blocking the country

There are five guidelines along which the Report suggests moving forward.

• Investing in the future: the first move has to do with the creation of suitable cultural and institutional conditions to make possible trust in what is yet to come, according to a more desirable development model, which takes shape around the two drivers of sustainability and digitization.
• People first: demographic decline, educational delays, (bad) management of the migration phenomenon… Italy has forgotten that development is possible only starting from people. If you don’t start over there, there’s no future.
• Against demotivating inequality: despite high social spending, inequality remains a brake on the country’s development. It is necessary to intervene on the welfare system: to abandon the logic of assistance to embrace that of generative empowerment.
• The ecosystem of singularity: Italy is Italy only if and when it is able to reproduce and re-enact that quality and variety that the world envies us. This implies the need to take care of the ecosystem (social and environmental) to reactivate its spontaneous generativity.
• The new framework of the common good of sustainability: despite some positive indicators, Italy is struggling to set up a policy that is up to the situation. And yet, sustainability, in a broad sense, is the crucial lever for rethinking the country’s development, not only for economic reasons but also for regenerating that sense of participation in a common plan that is disappearing.

Mauro Magatti: “To unblock Italy, it is necessary to overcome the reductive idea of ​​growth which is satisfied with the exploitation of short-term opportunities
period: it is only in the logic of development that it is possible to introduce a different perspective. It is no longer a matter of simply grasping the
opportunities, as well as to generate new ones. Which means that integral development, in the sustainable-contributory logic – process together
individual and collective, public and private, economic and social, cultural and technological, entrepreneurial and institutional – it is a condition for growth
in the next years”.

Pierluigi Stefanini: “Unipolis Foundation has worked alongside the Alliance for Generativity in recent years, recognizing the value of a model
of analysis oriented towards sustainability, which places the role of people and communities at the center of interpretation. For this we further
persuaded to use it to analyze the current situation in Italy, since it allows a reading that already has intrinsic guidelines
intervention and, by adopting an integrated and systemic vision, it allows us to have the right complex, and not simplistic, vision of life”.