Objective 4: Support integrated policies for sustainable local development
This objective is consistent with challenges posed by the Report “Reimagining Our Futures Together: a new social contract for education” (UNESCO International Commission on the Futures of Education, 2021). This document advocates the need for a new vision of the future that is democratic and local, valuing individual and collective action and the wealth of cultural diversity as assets for sustainable, peaceful and inclusive development. The challenges of the modern world, in this sense, entail the need for a change of direction that identifies inclusiveness and high-quality education as driving forces for change. This is not only because developments in the world of work necessitate a reconsideration of the skills of individuals with respect to economic and employment needs, due to the speed of digital technology, but also and especially because global and local development entail the increasingly democratic and active participation of individuals in their multiple roles as administrators, workers, volunteers and ordinary citizens in order to plan and manage development interventions that are truly in line with local socio-economic needs and requirements. The challenge posed by the UNESCO document is how to narrow the gap between the vision presented in the report and the current reality, taking into consideration the way in which policies shape education. The key principles of UNESCO ‘new social contract’ (2021) – ensuring the right to quality education throughout life and strengthening education as a public common good – are translated and pursued through a series of interventions that converge in the establishment of local alliances capable of involving the various actors of society in the process of defining educational policies for lifelong and lifewide learning. In this sense, education can no longer be an exclusive area of planning limited to the public sector and implemented in schools, but necessarily becomes a collective goal that can only be pursued by activating and involving the entire community in governance processes, as a form of government that encourages the involvement of all social partners in the definition and implementation of synergistic sustainable development strategies. The above integrated approach should build on the different ways in which human capital is formed and carefully consider the different formal and informal spaces in which human capital is produced and reproduced in its many forms. The physical and urban dimensions are also essential to managing situations of crisis, containing, through resilience-oriented planning, the potentially destructive effects on human capital of the climate crisis, of pandemics and of other disasters induced by man or produced by nature. This integrated and systemic approach to the planning and management of interventions and actions requires specific professional skills, both at central and peripheral levels, with particular reference to local administrations as the main actors. This approach also requires the management of bottom-up processes and active participation of the community in decision-making processes, respecting its different forms of organization. The Chair is interested in investigating effective models of participatory governance, institutional capacity building for innovative and integrated approaches, value of local cultural ecosystem services for community well-being. In the following table a synthesis is reported of the main activities, related outcomes, timing and geographic coverage.
Last update
11.06.2025