Progress from a civil society perspective: Sbilanciamoci! and the Italian case of the indicator QUARS Constructing indicators of progress/well-being with citizens/communities Council of Europe Office – Paris July 2008

Sbilanciamoci! Civil society campaign involving 46 Italian associations, NGOs and networks Working on public policies, globalisation, peace, human rights, environment, fair trade, ethical finance Focus on Italian budgetary policies, arguing for social and environmental priorities Advocacy  Research activities  Lobby  Political and cultural animation

Main targets Make public opinion and politicians familiar with a consolidate idea (raising awareness) Foster legitimacy through a bottom-up process Turn CSOs knowledge into statistics Identify and monitor key variables for sustainable well-being

Legitimacy: power into authority “Legitimacy is a shared expectation among actors in an arrangement of asymmetric power, such that the actions of those who rule are accepted voluntarily by those who are ruled because the latter are convinced that the actions of the former conform to pre-established norms.” (Schmitter P., What is there to legitimize in EU…and how might this be accomplished?, Jean Monet Working Paper n.6/01, 2001)

Lack of legitimacy Right to rule and obligation to obey Rules towards well being and progress (policy objectives) No agreement on progress and well being concepts. Economic growth  GDP turned to be not enough but are still used to indicate the direction Fail to meet policy objectives

Bottom-up process A model of progress is needed Wide consultation of civil society groups (validate the vision: legitimacy increases) Identification of key variables and indicators (weights implicit in the model)

QUARS 1.Environment: environmental impact and good practices 2.Economy and labour: working condition and income distribution 3.Rights and citizenship: social inclusion and basic rights 4.Equal opportunity: women participation to economic and political life + services 5.Education and culture: level of education, quality of structures, access to cultural events 6.Health: quality and efficiency of the services, general health of population 7.Participation: citizens' participation to social and political life

Aggregation The aggregation method consists of a normalization of values  The composite indicator is based on the normalized scores for each indicator  Outliers (more robust) The indicators are then aggregated to macro-indicators. The average of the macro-indicators is the final QUARS.

Weaknesses scarce availability of non-conventional data e.g. on democratic participation or a fair economy  gap between the development model defined by civil society and the available data does not identify distance-to-target  does not permit to determine a region’s performance in absolute terms, but only in relation to the other regions taken into consideration. it is not possible to build QUARS time series of a region, only the rank position of a certain region can be followed over time

Variables

Italy according to QUARS08 REGIONEQUARS Trentino-Alto Adige1,57 Emilia-Romagna1,00 Friuli-Venezia Giulia0,95 Toscana0,82 Valle d'Aosta0,74 Umbria0,69 Marche0,65 Lombardia0,61 Veneto0,53 Piemonte0,46 Liguria0,25 Lazio0,04 Abruzzo-0,11 Sardegna-0,27 Basilicata-0,78 Molise-0,80 Calabria-1,32 Puglia-1,52 Sicilia-1,65 Campania-1,86

Merci beaucoup!