Italy and Europe

There is a particular kind of organisation that development literature tends to overlook. It is not large enough to command institutional attention. It does not produce the kind of measurable outputs that satisfy donor reporting requirements. It does not scale in ways that make it legible to policymakers looking for replicable models. What it does instead is something harder to quantify and more durable in its effects: it shows up, consistently, in the places and with the people that larger systems have not reached, and it builds — slowly, carefully, and with genuine respect for the communities it works with — the conditions under which those people can begin to act on their own behalf.

Kora and Primi Piani are two such organisations. Both are based in Italy. Both operate at what the UN’s 2030 Agenda calls the foundational level — the local, the specific, the irreducibly human scale at which the Sustainable Development Goals either become real in people’s lives or remain abstractions in policy documents. And both, in their different ways, embody the principles that thirty years of field experience across three continents have confirmed: that communities have the resources to shape their own lives, that what they need is a catalyst rather than a solution, and that rights are only meaningful when people have the capability and the confidence to claim them.

Kora is an association working at the intersection of community development, food systems, environmental education, and local governance. Its starting point is the conviction — shared with the South Africa programme, with the transition economy work, with Sen’s capability approach — that development is not something done to communities but something that emerges from within them when the conditions are right.

The Food-Back programme is a practical illustration of what this looks like in practice. Built around the relationship between food, community, and local democratic participation, it embeds a rights-based approach not as an explicit framework to be taught but as a lived methodology — communities learning through doing, acquiring organisational and civic capability through the experience of managing something real and meaningful together. The echo of the Olifants-Doorn model is not coincidental. The logic is the same: water, or food, or any resource that is genuinely central to daily life becomes the catalyst through which broader empowerment becomes possible.

What distinguishes Kora’s approach is its insistence on working at the intersection of the local and the global — not as a rhetorical gesture but as a practical commitment. The international frameworks that govern rights, sustainability, and participation are not left at the level of abstraction. They are brought into contact with the specific community, the specific place, the specific set of relationships and capabilities that exist there. The SDGs become tools rather than targets. The rights framework becomes a resource rather than a requirement.

This is more difficult than it sounds. It requires practitioners who understand both the international architecture and the local reality with sufficient depth to move fluently between them — who can help a community in a small Italian town understand that its struggle for clean water, or fair food systems, or meaningful participation in local planning, is connected to commitments made at the highest levels of international governance, and that those commitments create obligations that can be named, cited, and acted upon. Kora has developed that capacity through years of patient, unglamorous, genuinely community-centred work.

Primi Piani works with young people and communities on processes of civic engagement, cultural participation, and local democracy. Its reach extends well beyond Italy, connecting local practice to European and international frameworks in ways that make the legislative architecture of the EU and the UN legible and usable at community level.

The organisation’s name — which translates roughly as first plans, or front pages, or close-ups, depending on context — captures something essential about its approach. It works in close-up: with the specific young person, in the specific community, at the specific moment when the question of whether engagement with institutions is worth the effort is still open. That moment matters enormously. The research on psychological empowerment is unambiguous: the experience of being taken seriously, of having one’s voice heard and responded to, of achieving something through collective action, changes people’s relationship to their own agency in ways that persist long after the programme has ended.

For many of the young people Primi Piani works with, the European Union is a distant and largely incomprehensible institution — present in their lives through regulations and funding streams and political arguments they have not been equipped to participate in. The 2030 Agenda is, if they have encountered it at all, a list of goals that seems to have little connection to the community they actually live in. Primi Piani’s work is to close that distance — to show young people that the frameworks exist, that they apply to them, that the rights they enshrine are not aspirational but legally grounded, and that local democracy is the level at which those rights become most directly actionable.

This connects directly to the EU’s own advocacy for SDG localisation — the process through which global goals are translated into local plans, local indicators, and local accountability mechanisms. The Joint Research Centre’s work on localising the SDGs in Europe provides the intellectual architecture. Primi Piani provides the human connection: the practitioners who sit with young people in community centres and meeting rooms and outdoor spaces and help them understand that the gap between where they are and where the frameworks say they should be is not inevitable, and that they have both the right and the capacity to do something about it.

Neither Kora nor Primi Piani emerged from the South Africa programme or the transition economy work. They are independent organisations with their own histories, their own methodologies, and their own communities of practice. But the conversation between these bodies of experience is real and generative — and in at least one case, direct.

One of Kora’s staff members spent two years in South Africa, part of which involved working with and observing elements of the community-driven IWRM process in practice. That experience — of seeing what genuine community participation looks like when it is taken seriously as a methodology rather than a gesture, of watching marginalised communities acquire organisational and civic capability through the management of concrete, meaningful projects — did not produce a template to be exported. It produced something more valuable: a deepened understanding of what the conditions for empowerment actually are, and what practitioners need to bring to the work if those conditions are to be created rather than merely described.

That understanding is visible in Kora’s approach. The insistence on starting from the community rather than from the programme. The use of food, like water in the South African context, as a catalyst for broader organisational and civic development. The embedding of rights not as a framework to be taught but as a lived methodology — something communities discover they already have access to through the experience of acting collectively on something that matters to them.

This kind of cross-pollination between field experiences in radically different contexts is, in itself, a form of what the empowerment literature calls knowledge transfer — though that phrase does not quite capture it. What transfers is not knowledge in the abstract but the practitioner’s capacity to recognise, in a new context, the same essential dynamic that produced results in a previous one.

The Olifants-Doorn communities and the communities Kora works with in northern Italy share neither their material circumstances nor their cultural context nor their institutional frameworks. What they share is the fundamental human situation of people who have not previously been given genuine reason to believe that their participation in the decisions that shape their lives is either possible or consequential.

Connecting thread — South Africa to Italy

The communities that the South Africa programme was designed to serve were marginalised by apartheid, by poverty, by the distance between a progressive constitution and the daily reality of dealing with institutions that were indifferent at best and hostile at worst. The marginalisation was visible, documented, and the subject of sustained political attention.

The marginalisation that characterises significant parts of contemporary European society is less visible and considerably harder to name. It does not announce itself in the language of poverty or exclusion — at least not always. It announces itself instead in disengagement: in the sense, particularly among younger generations, that the institutions of democracy are not designed for them, do not respond to them, and cannot be influenced by them. It announces itself in the erosion of the social infrastructure — the public services, the community anchors, the frameworks of mutual obligation — that previous generations could take for granted. It announces itself in the distance between what the European Union’s legislative framework promises in terms of rights, sustainability, and participation, and what people in local communities actually experience.

Amartya Sen’s proposition — that poverty is the absence of capability, not merely the absence of money — applies here with full force. A young person in a post-industrial community in northern England or southern Italy who has grown up without meaningful civic engagement, without knowledge of the rights and frameworks that exist to protect and empower them, without the experience of institutions that take their voice seriously: that person is poor in Sen’s sense, regardless of their income.

The 2030 Agenda’s commitment to leaving nobody behind is not, in most European countries, a commitment that is being met. The EU’s own sustainable development indicators — tracked by Eurostat — document persistent and in some cases widening gaps in wellbeing, participation, and capability across member states. The legislative architecture exists. The rights framework exists. The gap between framework and reality is, in most cases, not a gap of resources or intention. It is a gap of methodology — of knowing how to reach people where they are, in terms they can use, through processes that build rather than bypass their agency.

Localising the SDGs, as the EU’s Joint Research Centre has advocated, means exactly what the word implies: bringing the global framework into contact with the specific, granular, irreducibly local reality of communities and the people in them. It means training young people not only to know their rights but to use them — in local planning processes, in engagement with municipal authorities, in the construction of the small-scale initiatives through which civic capability is actually built.

That is what a catalyst does. It does not create the reaction. It makes the reaction possible.

The thread connecting South Africa, the transition economies, and the present work in Italy

Both organisations operate locally but think and connect globally. This is not a contradiction. It is, in fact, the model that the most effective community empowerment work has always followed: rooted deeply in a specific place and community, but connected to the broader frameworks, networks, and bodies of experience that prevent local practice from becoming parochial.

The food systems work that Kora develops in northern Italy connects to international networks of community-based food sovereignty. The civic engagement programmes that Primi Piani runs with young people in Italian towns connect to European networks of SDG localisation and to the global movement for youth participation in local governance. These connections matter not because they make the local work more prestigious, but because they make it more effective — because communities that understand their situation as part of a larger pattern are better equipped to act on it than communities that experience their difficulties as purely local and therefore purely their own problem to solve.

Knowledge of the framework is not sufficient for empowerment. But it is necessary for it.

Kora

Food-Back programme

Primi Piani APS

Primi Piani

EU SDG localisation — Joint Research Centre

CEMR/Platforma — Localising the SDGs in Europe

EU approach to SDGs

Eurostat SDG indicators