We need more data on how Italian RRF projects are progressing

The Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) was approved by the European Council on 13 July 2021. Since then, a complex administrative machine has started with the aim of implementing such an ambitious and financially relevant plan. A machine that involved all levels of government, from national to local.

PNRR investments are made through projects. Each project is a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. For example, to achieve the objective of “increasing the educational offer in the 0-6 age group throughout the national territory” it is necessary to build or renovate 2550 nursery schools and create 150,000 new places. Every nursery is a project.

To understand whether investments are being made on time and with the necessary quality, it is essential to have information on all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. Only in this way is it possible to accurately reconstruct the overall data and understand where there are problems, in order to intervene in time.

What is happening now is that this complex administrative machine is struggling to collect information. Some analysts, including those at the Openpolis foundation, have questioned whether the Government really has a clear picture of how PNRR projects are going, especially those managed at a local level.

Without updated data on the progress of the construction sites and related payments, it is really hard to reconstruct a reliable picture of how the PNRR is progressing as a whole and therefore to communicate it to the European institutions and citizens.

One thing is certain. On the website of the official government portal Italia Domani, aimed at communicating the results of the PNRR, there has never been any trace of information on the progress of the projects. Since April 2023, we have known, for example, what projects are called, where they are, how much they cost, which administrations are responsible, and which public tenders are associated. The publication of that data was certainly a big step forward. But we still don’t know which projects are underway or completed, how much funding has been spent, or whether administrative procedures are progressing or blocked.

We promote “civic” monitoring of public funds, based precisely on the analysis of these individual pieces of the puzzle. Without this information, it is much more complicated for citizens to understand and control how the funds are spent, evaluate their effectiveness, and help make the infrastructures and services created more useful and closer to real needs. Reconstructing this information from the bottom up is not impossible, but it is necessary to contact each administration directly, with time and patience, and a response is not guaranteed.

We too therefore join, with the “Dati Bene Comune” campaign and the PNRR Civic Observatory , the Openpolis Foundation’s proposal to send a new #FOIA request on the data of the #PNRR projects and tenders . We ask the President of the Council of Ministers Giorgia Meloni and Minister Raffaele Fitto for full transparency on the Plan.

▶️ Learn more about the missing data on the PNRR on the OpenPolis website [in Italian]

▶️ Go to the “Dati Bene Comune” campaign on the PNRR [in Italian]