"The quality of collective well-being cannot be asserted without the involvement of citizens and intermediate bodies, as they are those that measure daily the level of well-being that the system can guarantee".

This was stated by the president of the CNEL, Tiziano Treu, at the presentation of the programmatic Guidelines of the "Benessere Italia" Steering committee of the Prime Minister's Office, which was held in Villa Lubin in the presence of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. The event was attended by presidents and managers of major Italian companies and public bodies, as well as representatives of the university world and various ministers and members of the Government including the Minister of Labour Nunzia Catalfo, Minister for Education Lucia Azzolina and Minister for Technological Innovation Paola Pisano, and the Minister for Relations with Parliament Federico D'Incà. The collective well-being of citizens and businesses, as emerged from the 2019 CNEL Report to Parliament and the Government, presented last 15 January, is closely connected to the levels and quality of public services.

"The quantum leap we must aim at is to connect the measurement of collective well-being, i.e. the photograph of the current reality, with territorial development programs, also thanks to the new forecast analysis models that are available. In this vein, we are developing a project in collaboration with ANCI (National Association of Italian Municipalities) and with a research group of the Sapienza University of Rome and National Research Council (CNR) which involves the use of 'territorial fitness' "- added President Treu -" If we can connect and bring together the objectives of public policies and the action of the private system, not only will we have a quantity of data available to develop informed choices, but we will also have the conditions to establish a medium-term path on which the efforts and the investments of the entire country system can come together".

The name of the direction cabin, as the Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte also mentioned, draws inspiration from the BES, the indicators of Equitable and Sustainable Well-being created in 2013 by Cnel and Istat.

"Indeed it is Europe, with the 2030 Agenda and its famous 17 goals, which urges us to a courageous change, to a radical shift of perspective, involving all political actors" - said the Prime Minister in his speech - "On the other hand, article 3 of the Treaty on European Union, taken from the same Steering committee as a criterion in the analysis of the progress of Europe, and of the various Member States, introduces among the main objectives of the Union the sustainable development, an economic and balanced growth, an economy aiming at social progress and full employment, as well as a high environmental protection. We must become a system: the government, businesses, trade associations, rapresentatives of the world of research and the academic one, various foundations. Only in this way will we be able to pursue the objectives of the 2030 agenda, and then we will be able to target that objective that I have just defined as very ambitious of climate neutrality by 2050. This is the specific goal for which the Steering committee was established: to foster the maximum synergy with all the stakeholders, the main players involved in this complex, arduous undertaking that can thus find, here, a place to interact, to discuss, as well as to manifest the diversity of views, if any, to enrich each other and converge in the identification and the definition of the best tools to achieve and pursue these ambitious challenges, as this remains the objective. "

The public event was preceded by the meeting of the Steering committee, of which the CNEL will be part of, as announced by the coordinator Filomena Maggino during the presentation of the programmed lines.

 “This initiative falls within days of the European Parliament's approval of the Green New Deal for climate neutrality. At CNEL, in June 2019, at the end of the annual meeting and of the representatives of the 'Economic and Social Councils' of the EU Countries and the EESC, in the presence of President Mattarella, the first document was drawn up containing formal Recommendations on sustainable development and social pillar that were sent to the European institutions in the aftermath of the election of the new Parliament, "continued Treu. 

Perhaps few people know that the BES was born from an initiative that CNEL and ISTAT started together in 2011, in order to identify statistical indicators capable of highlighting the long-term trends of the most relevant aspects for the quality of life. Istat immediately asked for the involvement of the social forces represented at CNEL, so that experimentation wouldn’t be limited to a methodological approach or a quantitative statistical exercise, but would allow the social parts to select the "detectors" of individual and collective quality of life. A "frontier" theme that is part of the attempts to overcome GDP as the only indicator of the level of well-being achieved by a country and to identify ways of assessing the results of the policies introduced by governments and the overall effects that these policies have on the life of citizens. For these reasons, CNEL has taken on the theme of sustainable development as the guiding thread of the various sectors of analysis and proposal that characterize its daily work. "We currently know that Istat is involved in the project 'Measures of Equitable and Sustainable Well-being of the territories' to build a system of territorial indicators consistent with the Bes framework adopted at national level, in order to measure territorial differences in well-being. Under the agreement already active and as already agreed upon by the President Gian Carlo Blangiardo, the CNEL is ready from 2020 to work towards next year release", concluded Tiziano Treu.

Watch the interview with the President Giuseppe Conte