Problems and Purpose

This process stems from the need to address environmental challenges in a more collaborative and inclusive way, with particular attention to the role played by younger generations in raising awareness and generating knowledge. While environment and participation are regarded as strategic policy areas at the regional level, they are often treated as separate domains. Addressing such issues is at the heart of the EU-funded project “PHOENIX – The Rise of Citizens’ Voices for a Greener Europe”, which seeks to explore how participatory practices can become more attentive and responsive to environmental concerns. The region Emilia-Romagna was selected among the eleven pilots distributed across seven different European countries.

In this context, an opportunity to tackle this problem was provided by the evaluative clause included in the Emilia-Romagna regional law on participation (LR 15/2018) [4], which requires a revision of the priorities and incentives for future participatory processes every three years [5]. Though prepared by the Regional Council, this clause uses a shared qualitative analysis and its content pays attention to the opinion of citizens participating in, or affected by, regional participatory initiatives. From 2022 on, these analyses must also include the assessment of the effects these initiatives have caused on environmental quality (LR 11/2022, art. 32) [6].

Offering the Regional Council bottom-up suggestions on this matter was also a valuable chance to engage young citizens and experiment with innovative participatory methods. In this regard, including the use of art-based and playful approaches was deemed as an effective way to foster engagement and reflection among participants. The main goal of the process was to bring younger generations into the conversation, promote environmental awareness and, ultimately, contribute to public policymaking.

Background History and Context

The region of Emilia-Romagna is located in northern Italy and its territory comprises many different landscapes, including the Apennine mountains, the hills surrounding them, the fertile Po valley, and the seacoast. Although the area has long been inhabited, urbanisation and industrialisation intensified during the XX century, leading the region to reach approximately 4,5 million inhabitants. It is widely recognised as a pioneer in institutional citizen participation, having adopted a regional law on this topic already in 2010 (LR 3/2010). This legislation, later revised in 2018 (LR 15/2018), promotes public involvement in policymaking by establishing structured participatory processes for strategic regional decisions. Each process is overseen by a participation expert appointed by the Regional Council, who acts as a guarantor. These processes involve public authorities, private actors, associations, and citizens, with the goal of representing diverse interests, facilitating negotiation, and producing a final proposal that must be considered in final deliberations.

Participation is embedded as a cross-cutting principle in regional frameworks such as the Labour and Climate Pact (Patto per il Lavoro e per il Clima) [7], approved in 2020, which aligns the region with the goals of the Agenda 2030. The region has long shown commitment to environmental protection, ongoing with laws such as LR 6/2005 on Natura 2000 sites [8] and later initiatives responding to European directives and emerging challenges. While the Labour and Climate Pact reflect this effort, it aims to reconcile economic development and environmental challenges and, although it is not exempt from criticism [9], it highlights that environmental and climate concerns are, along with participation, key aspects of the region’s strategic vision.

Organizing, Supporting, and Funding Entities

The Horizon 2020 project PHOENIX is the founder and promoter of the initiative developed in collaboration with the Emilia-Romagna region. Public employees of the Participation Sector of the region actively collaborated throughout the process with the research group of the Department of Architecture of the University of Florence, which was in charge of the Emilia-Romagna pilot. While PHOENIX covered all direct costs, the role of local actors, among which the teachers of the two high school classes, ecoLogicStudio, and the personnel in charge of the cultural centre “Le Serre dei Giardini” [3], has been fundamental to successfully implementing the initiative. In particular, ecoLogicStudio [2] adapted existing materials and ideas to create a tailored exhibition. Two designers conducted a guided tour of the exhibition, explaining the core ideas and motivations driving their work. “Le Serre” staff took care of all organisational aspects related to the installation and the workshop.

Participant Recruitment and Selection

The recruitment of participants was directly linked to the focus on environmental issues and civic engagement that characterised the initiative. Given the concern that younger generations tend to have about environmental and climate-related issues, organisers decided to select students as main participants. High school students, in particular, were considered an ideal target for testing playful and interactive approaches while also discussing topics with political relevance, such as environmental policymaking. Although the recruitment was influenced by the availability of schools and teachers, who had the final say on whether to join the initiative, selecting two entire classes from two different schools gave us the opportunity to also have an heterogeneous – but still not randomised – group.

After an initial screening of potential institutions, organisational and practical considerations ultimately led to the selection of schools within the city of Bologna, where the headquarters of the region are located. Following several consultations and email exchanges, two classes – one from the Liceo artistico Arcangeli di Bologna and one from the ISS Mattei di San Lazzaro di Savena – each with around 25 students aged approximately 16 years, agreed to participate.

Beyond the teachers and students, a broader audience has had the opportunity to visit the artistic installation curated by ecoLogicStudio at “Le Serre dei Giardini” in Bologna. The exhibition, titled “The soft technology of nature” [10] was open to the public from the 26th of March and the 1st of April 2025. The estimated number was approximately more than 100 visitors.

Methods and Tools Used

This participatory process unfolded through a sequence of activities combining lectures, creative exercises, and collaborative approaches to reflect on citizen participation and environmental policymaking. The methodological proposal, developed by PHOENIX researchers and reviewed by the region, aimed to provide participants with an informative experience while maintaining an experimental and playful character. To achieve this, different methods were employed in different stages. The initial phases of the process can be ascribed to a traditional classroom-taught approach. Key information was delivered through Power Point Presentations, speeches, and in-person interactions taking place during plenary or group sessions.

Following these preliminary steps, two days of workshops were held to test more experimental and playful techniques. As shown more in detail in the next section, the first workshop included an immersive visit to an artistic installation, stimulating reflections on human-nature relations, and creative writing activities conducted in small groups. The second one included role-play simulations where students were asked to personify human and non-human elements. Such activities culminated in the collaborative design of a fictional neighbourhood regeneration plan and the drafting of suggestions for future regional policies. These were later presented in a final event where the outcomes of this process were reported to formal representative organs of the region Emilia-Romagna. Overall, this blend of approaches combining experiential learning opportunities, art, and collaborative writing, was aimed at engaging students while stimulating empathy and awareness from a more-than-human perspective.

What Went On: Process, Interaction, and Participation

Introductory lectures

Each of the two classes attended a lecture introducing the goals of PHOENIX and the topic of citizen participation, with a focus on Emilia-Romagna. The initial phases of the process followed a traditional classroom-taught approach, as it was necessary to provide students with general information about the goals of the project, the region’s participatory mechanisms, and the need to rethink the relationship between society and nature. Presentations created with PowerPoint were used to convey key concepts, while other information was shared through speeches and in-person interactions in plenary or group settings.

First workshop

Students took part in a guided tour of an exhibition by ecoLogicStudio at “I Giardini delle Serre” in Bologna, which bridged art, scientific dissemination, and technological innovation. The installation emphasised the role of algae as air purifiers and showcased possible ways to integrate these ecological functions into human-made environments. Though grounded in scientific knowledge, the exhibition was presented as an artistic and interactive experience sparking reflections on innovative human-nature relationships. This was followed by a collective writing workshop organised in mixed groups of around eight students. Each student wrote a sentence in response to a series of prompts (e.g., “plants can teach us…” or “if I were an alga…”), passing their paper to the next person and folding it to conceal the previous lines. At the end, the students read aloud the collaboratively created poems, explaining their meaning and revealing surprising – and often humorous – narratives. In the final part of the exercise, each group selected key words from their texts and used them to co-create a short story featuring a living protagonist, later shared in plenary.

To observe the potential effects of interacting with the installation, the two classes visited it at different times: one before, and one after the writing activity. The students were therefore divided into three groups during the writing process. The first group consisted of students who had visited the installation; the second group consisted of students who had not yet visited it, while the third group was a mixture of the two. These three types of groups (visited, not visited, mixed) allowed for an analysis of possible correlations between exposure to the installation and the presence of natural elements in the creative texts. Additionally, a master’s student from the Psychology Department of the University of Florence (FORLILPSI) distributed a questionnaire based on the notion of Readiness to Change (RTC) scale, which aims to assess the attitudes toward climate change before and after the process. These include its perceived importance, motivation for change, social support, and the personal ability to act to produce change, among others.

Second workshop

This workshop, coordinated by UNIFI and held at the region’s headquarters, built on the previous experiences and aimed to operationalise them. The activities began with an icebreaker in which students picked a natural element (e.g., tree, glacier, wolf...) that he would represent throughout the session. During this phase, a string was used to connect different students and metaphorically represent an ecosystem composed of the elements they chose. This was followed by a role-play activity in four groups, where each student had to identify with their chosen element and propose possible actions and/or policies to defend its rights. Each group, supported by a facilitator from the university team, produced a list of policy recommendations from the non-human perspective.

Based on a selection of the most recurrent themes that emerged in each table during the previous phase (e.g. forests or water cycles), a second role-play aimed to simulate a participatory process. Here roles were reversed, with facilitators representing the table’s natural elements and students representing a human subject (e.g., mayor, farmer, developer, citizen, activist). With these roles, students were asked to negotiate the transformation of a fictional neighbourhood to improve its ecological performance. The task required balancing individual goals and considering the rights of the natural element represented by the facilitator.

Final event

The final phase consisted of a hybrid meeting in which some of the students who had participated in previous activities presented their experiences and the outcomes of the process to the “Assemblea dei Ragazzi e delle Ragazze” [11]. This is a formally recognised youth regional parliament of minors aged 11 to 18 year-old living in Emilia-Romagna, established in 2021 for providing opinions, assessments, and proposals to the regional administration. A final document containing key guidelines and recommendations was drafted and formally submitted to the Regional Council in the final steps of the project.

Influence, Outcomes, and Effects

The final output of the process consists mainly of a list of priorities formulated by the two high school classes. These priorities, presented as a set of guidelines, include various actions aimed at enhancing environmental stewardship at the regional level. The resulting document will serve as a basis for discussion in the “Assemblea dei Ragazzi e delle Ragazze” [11] and will be presented to the Regional Council. This outcome is intended to support the regional decisions on how to allocate funds for participatory initiatives, with the goal of emphasising the environmental dimension underlying participation and prioritising those processes that have strong environmental relevance.

Specifically, the guidelines identified at least seven areas of intervention. These emphasised the need to transform urban and rural areas into more welcoming and biodiverse habitats through greening, rewilding, and the creation of ecological corridors, as well as to reconfigure societal habits related to production and consumption patterns.

In broader terms, outcomes can be divided into effects on participants and effects on institutions. With regard to the students who participated (and the teachers accompanying them), it represented a valuable opportunity to interact with public institutions and explore a wide range of topics, ranging from civic engagement and democratic participation to environmental challenges and broader policy frameworks related to the ecological transition. Being topics that rarely fall within the scope of ordinary teaching activities, it can be viewed as an interesting case where civic learning and environmental awareness went hand in hand and mutually reinforce one another. Using experimental engagement methods, which leverage creativity and peer interactions, was an added value that contributed to achieving these outcomes. This has been confirmed by the data collected through the RTC questionnaire, which was submitted to independent samples of students before and after the above-mentioned activities. Results showed that one particular parameter indicating the perceived ability to produce change has changed in statistically significant ways, meaning that the participatory activities increased the group's “level of concrete involvement in sustainable behaviour”.

Other relevant aspects are linked to institutional learning. First, integrating youth perspectives in institutional settings can be viewed as an unconventional, yet increasingly urgent, knowledge exchange – one that becomes even more significant when considering the disproportionate impact of climate change on younger and future generations. Second, utilizing the legal framework provided by the law on participation and its evaluation clause (LR 15/2018 and LR 11/2022, art. 32) [4] [5], this initiative has begun a dialogical process within the regional institutions that has challenged consolidated practices and fostered a gradual integration of participatory and environmental policies. Although this process is still ongoing, PHOENIX has contributed to make this issue more visible and planted a seed for longer-term transformations. These efforts are aligned with the Region’s willingness to continue consolidating and expanding participatory policies, by promoting a systemic approach and experimenting with innovative methodologies.

Analysis and Lessons Learned

While these are global challenges that largely fall under the responsibility of national and international actors, the role of regional and local institutions can nonetheless be decisive. This process contributed to strengthening this potential role in various ways.

First, it engaged participants who, due to their age, are normally excluded from political processes even though they are, and will continue to be, highly affected by the environmental and climate crisis. The selection of classes was not randomised due to logistical and organisational reasons, and therefore it is not representative of the entire region. Nonetheless, involving two classes from two different schools in Bologna allowed us to obtain a rather heterogeneous group of participants, showing different degrees of awareness and motivation. In this regard, the adoption of innovative methodologies of engagement such as experiential learning and collaborative creative activities proved more effective than conventional teaching methods as they supported sustained engagement throughout the process.

Second, the knowledge exchange that occurred provided participants with a deeper understanding of participatory policies and ecological dynamics, leading to higher-quality deliberation. The implemented methods reflected an effort to stimulate empathy for more-than-humans. They were aimed at expanding the participants’ perspective and enhancing their awareness of environmental conflicts that might derive from anthropic activities. As such, role-play simulations in which participants were asked to interpret natural and human actors served as a way to make frictions, synergies, and trade-offs more visible, eventually leading to overcoming those conflicts in a more deliberative manner. This can also be viewed as a step toward a better understanding of complex issues, to which the relationship between society and nature certainly belongs. Ideally, this knowledge exchange will contribute to favour not just awareness but also behavioural changes that may support the ecological transition. Data collected through the RTC questionnaire seems to confirm this tendency.

In conclusion, combining social learning, art, collective writing, and playful interactions fostered a collaborative environment that stimulated insights and cooperation. Furthermore, it stressed the potential linkages between participation efforts and environmental issues, which have remained compartmentalised in regional policies so far. This process could in fact be a first step toward a better integration of these policy branches, and stimulate synergies among stakeholders.

Nevertheless, the challenge of achieving substantial political and institutional recognition remains significant, and achieving these results requires significant preliminary work for coordinating all the actors involved. This initiative can be viewed as a small experiment that encouraged reflections on more-than-human perspectives and environmental stewardship, but its greater potential lies in the ability to pave the way for more radical and innovative policies in the near future.

References

[1] PHOENIX https://phoenix-horizon.eu/

[2] ecoLogicStudio https://www.ecologicstudio.com/

[3] Le Serre dei Giardini https://leserredeigiardini.it/

[4] https://partecipazione.regione.emilia-romagna.it/la-legge-e-il-bando/legge-regionale-partecipazione

[5] https://partecipazione.regione.emilia-romagna.it/la-legge-e-il-bando/legge-regionale-partecipazione/la-clausola-valutativa

[6] https://demetra.regione.emilia-romagna.it/al/articolo?urn=urn:nir:regione.emilia.romagna:legge:2022-08-03;11&dl_t=text/xml&dl_a=y&dl_id=10&pr=idx,0;artic,0;articparziale,1&anc=cap5

[7] https://www.regione.emilia-romagna.it/pattolavoroeclima

[8] https://ambiente.regione.emilia-romagna.it/it/parchi-natura2000/consultazione/normativa/norme-rer/lr-governo-sistema

[9] https://www.legambiente.emiliaromagna.it/2023/06/01/legambiente-emilia-romagna-esce-dal-patto-per-il-lavoro-e-il-clima-della-regione-emilia-romagna/

[10] https://partecipazione.regione.emilia-romagna.it/news/normali/news-2025/progetto-europeo-phoenix-un-percorso-pilota-in-emilia-romagna-e-l2019apertura-della-mostra-201cthe-soft-technology-of-nature201d

[11] https://www.assemblea.emr.it/garante-minori/ascolto-e-partecipazione/assemblea-dei-ragazzi-e-delle-ragazze

External Links

PHOENIX https://phoenix-horizon.eu/

Emilia-Romagna Region https://www.regione.emilia-romagna.it/

ecoLogicStudio https://www.ecologicstudio.com/

Le Serre dei Giardini https://leserredeigiardini.it/