Progress from a civil society perspective: Sbilanciamoci! and the Italian case of the indicator QUARS

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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
• 24-25 July 2008

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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

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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

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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
  EUand how might this be accomplished?, Jean
  Monet Working Paper n.6/01, 2001)

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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

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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)

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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

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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.

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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 regions 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

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Variables
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Variables
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Italy according to QUARS08
REGIONE QUARS
Trentino-Alto Adige 1,57
Emilia-Romagna 1,00
Friuli-Venezia Giulia 0,95
Toscana 0,82
Valle d'Aosta 0,74
Umbria 0,69
Marche 0,65
Lombardia 0,61
Veneto 0,53
Piemonte 0,46
Liguria 0,25
Lazio 0,04
Abruzzo -0,11
Sardegna -0,27
Basilicata -0,78
Molise -0,80
Calabria -1,32
Puglia -1,52
Sicilia -1,65
Campania -1,86
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• Merci beaucoup!