UNVEIL (Understanding Vulnerability to Expand Insight on Local units)

Recent crises have exposed rooted inequalities across territories, which have unveiled their different levels of vulnerability and,consequently, their different capacity to resist and react to challenges. A territory’s level of exposure to challenges and the featuresthat can heighten the impact of crises is commonly referred to as Vulnerability. Describing and monitoring territories’ patterns ofvulnerability is key to understanding their strengths and weaknesses, in order to identify the tailor-made actions that would makepolitical interventions effective and efficient. Measuring vulnerability, however, requires disentangling the concept across several dimensions, which might not be limited to socio-economic or environmental factors. In this respect, the often neglected political-institutional dimension of vulnerability stands out, since it determines a territory’s ability to effectively deliver policies and provide timely responses to crises through effective and democratic institutions (EC, SFR 2020). Vulnerability assessments are usually carried out at the supranational (e.g, the European Union), or country level. Subnational levels, and especially the smallest local units, are seldom included in the measurement efforts, despite often being the first bulwark of resistance against challenges, as the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic proved (CoR 2020; 2021). Against this background, the UNVEIL project undertakes the challenge of systematically embedding the measurement of the vulnerability of the local units into policymaking. It will do so by providing an encompassing conceptualization of vulnerability, across three main dimensions (Environmental, Socio-economic, Political-Institutional), on which developing an aggregate index (ESPIV index) for the measurement and monitoring of vulnerability of local units, and then provide policy-makers the knowledge to enact appropriate strategies. To empirically test the ESPIV index, UNVEIL will foreground Italy’s municipalities, which provide a heterogeneous sample of territories with different magnitudes of vulnerability and thus a sound starting point for future comparative research. UNVEIL has the ambition to have both scientific and practical relevance. Scientifically, it will contribute by adopting a multidisciplinary approach for the conceptualization and operationalization of vulnerability. UNVEIL will build on a combination of comparative, statistical, and case-study research design, and make use of both quantitative (descriptive and explanatory analyses of a large-N dataset, factor-analysis) and qualitative (literature review, semi-structured interviews, archive research) analysis to triangulate on data. The practical relevance of the UNVEIL project relies on the development of the ESPIV index, which can be used by policymakers to understand their territory’s vulnerability and thus devise and enact the most appropriate, tailor-made, and evidence-based strategies of action.