Thesis title: La tappa di un processo? La co-progettazione nelle politiche d’asilo: il caso di studio dei corridoi umanitari in Europa.
In the field of public policy analysis, the branch focused on the inclusive processes of deliberative nature is becoming more autonomous from the area studying participatory processes. Yet, little attention has been given to co-design as a relevant tool of deliberative policymaking. And this is even more striking when confronted with the increased interest in the involvement of civil society in a deliberative sense and with the formalization of deliberative tables. If the literature has placed greater emphasis on the collaborative nature of co-design, by adopting the gradualist theoretical perspective (Gastil, Fung, Levine, Lewanski, etc.) and by participating in the debate on deliberative instruments, this tool can instead be studied as an intermediate stage in the gradual consolidation of the democratic-deliberative form of government. Is co-design a tool for institutionalizing political-deliberative mechanisms? (RQ1). Empirically, this work documents and analyses this institutionalizing potential of co-design in the context of asylum policies, especially concerning complementary programmes to resettlement: so, to what extent is co-design the tool for institutionalizing community sponsorships within asylum policies? (RQ2). I therefore study the humanitarian corridors programmes to Europe as co-designs that can contribute to institutionalizing an ordinary mechanism – that of community sponsorship.
Adopting a logical-inferential approach, this work follows four methodological operations: (1) the formulation of the hypotheses of cause-effect relationship (influenced by the gradualist perspective), (2) the operationalization of the independent variable (co-design) and the dependent variable (the phenomenon of the institutionalization of political-deliberative mechanisms within asylum policies); (3) data collection on the co-design groups of the humanitarian corridors; (4) the construction of two groups of indicators (social institutionalization, focused on socio-relational factors and normative institutionalization, focused on legal-normative factors) and the measurement of the phenomenon. This thesis reaches the elaboration of deductions on the completion of the institutionalization process. The research design is therefore explanatory: it seeks to demonstrate the validation or falsification of the hypothesis. Of the co-design groups of humanitarian corridors, the Italian context (the first unit of analysis, where it originates) and the foreign ones (the second unit of analysis, between France, Belgium, San Marino and Andorra) are observed for the decade 2015-2025. The research results show that in asylum policies co-design tends to institutionalize an ordinary mechanism. More generally, the institutionalizing scope of the instrument is more driven by socio-relational factors than by legal-regulatory ones. In fact, if the social dimension of institutionalization (as it will be defined in chapter 2), is fully realized (as in the Italian one) or in the process of consolidation (as in the foreign ones), the juridical-normative dimension of the phenomenon remains only at its early stages. The normalization of social mechanisms from a relational point of view is therefore the necessary condition for the establishment of legal ones. Furthermore, the phenomenon is slowed down in the contexts of replication of the experience. In fact, it is more complete in the context of origin of the experience (the Italian one) than in the foreign one in which the project was replicated. By validating the gradualist hypothesis, this thesis therefore demonstrates that co-design is a sufficient condition for the occurrence of the studied phenomenon: by catalysing the continuation of the same process of institutionalization that generated it, co-design constitutes a stage in the gradual process of consolidation of the democratic-deliberative form of government.