Emilia-Romagna

EMILIA-ROMAGNA REGION

  • Presentation of your region and organisation:

Emilia-Romagna Region counts about 4,460,000 inhabitants (data on 1 January 2022), and 569,460 of them, equal to 12.8% of the total population has non-Italian citizenship and has the highest incidence of foreign residents of the total resident population in Italy (the national average is 8.5%). The migratory phenomenon in the Region is relatively recent: it started in the second half of the nineties of the last century and then exploded and consolidated over the last twenty years. A period that, combined with a significant stabilization on the territory, leads to an increasing acquisition of Italian citizenship that in the last years is even more significant. This aspect is very important as the demographic indicators of the native population indicate negative demographic balances, low birth rates and a high rate of aging so it is thanks to the migratory flows that the regional demographic trends are kept relatively balanced. Regarding the countries of origin, more than 170 citizenships are represented in Emilia-Romagna with flow trends that leads the larger of them to alternate with each other year by year.

 

The Regional Department of Social Planning, Integration, Inclusion, Tackling Poverty everyday cope with this phenomenon throughout many tools and actions such as:

  • Planning and governance of the policies for inclusion to be then run by all the actors involved (public and private) in the regional territory.
  • Co-designing of strategies and policies on integration along with all the public and private stakeholders (i.e.: intercultural mediations, courses of L2 for adult migrants, vocational training, and other tools for the access to the working system.
  • Financing project to be run at local level
  • Participating, at the national level, to the main processes of decision-making in the field.
  • Presentation of your ongoing work on integration: 

Emilia-Romagna Region has already adopted an Intercultural Approach in its own integration policies and promotes its strategies through a Regional Law (n. 5/2004) and a Triennial Plan of Action. All the work done till now lead the Region to have a high rank in nearly all the indicators of integration. The Emilia-Romagna network of intercultural centres, as well as the high presence of intercultural mediations in most of the facilities and services and the widespread reception services for the asylum seeker (small reception centers for an average number of 9/10 people each, widespread in all the regional territory covering more than 50% of the municipalities) are only some examples of what Emilia-Romagna accomplished.

 

  • Your role and expectations for the EU-BELONG project:

The co-building of a common definition of “intercultural approach” and then its implementation into co-designed local/regional strategy can be a powerful tool for European policies on integration, at all levels and it represents one of the main aims of this project. Furthermore, the exchange of methodologies and experiences with other EU Regions is always considered as an added value. 

 

  • Contacts for your region 

Marzio Barbieri, public officer, +39 331 7509069 [email protected]