Thesis title: La strategia di comunicazione del Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza: la narrazione dei governi Conte II, Draghi e Meloni
The dissertation offers a comparative analysis of the communication strategies surrounding Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) across the entire 2020–2023 cycle, spanning the three governments that shaped its genesis, negotiation, and implementation (Conte II, Draghi, Meloni). The central premise is that communication is not an accessory to policy but a constitutive instrument of governance: a set of organizational and cognitive choices that affects problem definition, consensus building, implementation capacity, and ultimately the legitimation of outcomes.
The study reconstructs the sequence across the three governments—leadership centrality (Conte II), institutional routinization (Mario Draghi), procedural legitimation (Giorgia Meloni)—and shows how each government realigned objectives, instruments, and narratives by making cumulative adjustments to the communicative and decision-making architecture.
The theoretical contribution sits at the intersection of policy design, emergency governance, and public communication. First, it foregrounds the idea that institutional framing acts as an enabling constraint: it selects priorities, makes certain outputs salient, and steers the visibility of results. Second, it links the proceduralization of communication to the construction of legitimacy for rules and processes, distinguishing between narratives oriented toward measurable results and narratives oriented toward perceived impact.
Methodologically, the dissertation adopts a three-phase mixed-methods design with source triangulation. (1) Documentary analysis: official acts, press releases, and institutional web materials from the Government and lead Ministries, treated as traces of policy communication. (2) Frame analysis of institutional social channels (the Presidency of the Council/Palazzo Chigi’s Facebook and Instagram) and of video/graphic content, with coding of narrative frames, communicative registers, and engagement indicators. (3) Comparative analysis of reporting devices to assess how information standardization supports implementation routines and accountability practices.
The main findings point to three distinct registers. Conte II operates in a context of high uncertainty and compressed timelines with a leader-centric register: the PNRR is presented as an unrepeatable opportunity and a generational investment, leveraging broad value-laden frames. The Draghi government advances the institutionalization of processes and of communication, which becomes an organizational infrastructure—sober, regular, predictable—that builds procedural trust and reduces implementation uncertainty. The Meloni government consolidates proceduralization while re-politicizing the frame: the narrative emphasizes responsibility, remodulations, and the “securing” of implementation, with a more visible role for political leadership at key junctures and strong emphasis on procedural results achieved at the European level.
Two cross-cutting criticalities emerge across the three governments. The first is a persistent communicative asymmetry: a broadcast model prevails (the center speaks, society listens), with scant institutionalization of engagement and feedback pathways. The second is the weakness of impact-oriented storytelling: project stories anchored in evidence and close to citizens’ everyday experience (more accessible services, infrastructure actually used, new employment opportunities, tangible environmental improvements) remain marginal compared to procedural outputs. This imbalance makes it harder to translate technical results into perceived public value.
On the scientific plane, the dissertation contributes by: (a) clarifying the link between institutional framing and implementation, showing how small framing variations cumulatively realign policy; (b) conceptualizing the proceduralization of communication as a form of legitimation capable of sustaining implementation capacity; (c) proposing a storytelling model for public policy that blends performance metrics, impact data, and place-based narratives.