L’attivazione fuori mercato nelle misure di contrasto alla povertà: i Progetti utili alla collettività come opportunità per i più vulnerabili

Anti-poverty measures and minimum income schemes, entirely situated within the paradigm of social investment and activation, have incorporated the underlying logic of active inclusion and conditionality constraints for using economic income support transfers throughout Europe. In most countries, this approach has taken on a workfarist profile over time, preferring the workfarist declination of both conditionality and activation. Italy fits into this vein with some specificities. The article focuses on Community Service Projects, included among the forms of conditionality and activation by the Citizenship Income, and – also looking at the recent measures introduced by the Meloni Government, the Inclusion Allowance and the Support for Training and Work - investigates their implementation. The aim is to understand whether the compulsory adherence to PUCs for all the RdC recipients without exemptions, without considering the actual degree of employability of the recipients, accentuates the purpose of mere counter-payment at the expense of the intention of empowerment that could be deployed with a better targeting on the most vulnerable people, more distant from the labor market, as international experience seems to suggest. Specifically, the article questions the workfarist shift in anti-poverty policies by framing Italy in the European context, using PUCs as a point of observation concerning their ambivalence between welfare ordeals and capacitation aims.