Over the last three decades, the sector of adult education acquired a new prominence at global level. A growing number of governments have increasingly adopted policies and reforms which targeted the organisations offering courses targeting adults and contributed to the widespread of the concept of lifelong learning. Within this process of institutionalisation, international organisations have gained an influential position.

It has been suggested that the growing interest for adult education by policy makers should be interpreted in connection with the development of governance tools, aimed to tackle social, economical and political issues under a neoliberal ideology (Griffin 1999a, 199b). Several studies showed, for instance, how a significant part of adult education policies implies discourses which often entangle with those embedded in policies on immigration, welfare and job market measures, social inclusion and citizenship issues (Milana et al. 2000; Van Oers et al. 2010; Fejes 2020, 2019).

This proposal presents the first results emerging from my on-going PhD project on adult education policies and practices. Overall, the PhD project focuses on the reform of the Italian adult education system, which led to the establishment of the Provincial Centres for Adult Instruction (Centri Provinciali per l’Istruzione degli Adulti, CPIA) in 2012. More specifically, it examines how the Italian reform understands the relationship between adult education and community development, and which functions the CPIAs should serve with this regard. The PhD project embraces an ethnographic approach; therefore, data collection includes participant observation, interviews and written documents.

For this proposal I draw exclusively on policy documents to explore the Italian reform process of formal adult education. Specifically, this proposal investigates the role that different political actors had on the policy construction process, and their different intentions; it traces the development of competing discourses on adult education and community development; and it better clarifies how policies create new relations, political actors and webs of meaning.

A growing body of research on adult education has already focussed on policy-making processes, from different theoretical perspectives.

In this proposal, policies are defined through an anthropological lens, as “policy worlds, [...]  windows onto political processes in which actors, agents, concepts and technologies interact in different sites, creating or consolidating new rationalities of governance and regimes of knowledge and power” (Shore, et al. 2011:2).

Moreover, this proposal challenge the conceptualisation of policies as linear, rational and hierarchical processes (Mitra 2018:69-76): it assumes that political actors do not operate at separate levels, and that the decision flow does not follow a top-down pattern, from the global to the local (Verger, et al.  2018:6-7). Accordingly, it embraces the concept of scale (Papanastasiou 2019), which understands political space as the result of the social interrelations among different actors.

With regard to this proposal, the more relational and heterogeneous conception of scale could help to better understand the Italian reform on adult education and its connections with the construction of a European area for lifelong learning (Ioannidou 2015). Even if many Italian studies recognise the European influence on national policies, this relationship has been not extensively problematised. Moreover, Italian policies on adult education still need to be investigated in order to better clarify how discourses on education entangle with discourses on different issues, such as economic development and social inclusion.

I will address this gap by answering the following research question and sub-questions:

How is the relationship between adult education and community development defined by the latest reform of the Italian adult education system?

1.Through which discourses is this relationship constructed?

2.How is the organisational and institutional role of the CPIAs defined?

3.How do cultural, political and economical contextual factors influence this process?

An interpretive perspective on policy analysis (Yanow 1999) informs the research question and its sub-questions. The aim of interpretive policy analysis is to map the architecture of meaning embedded in a policy. The first two steps of the analysis are intertwined: both the interpretive communities which are relevant in the construction of a policy issue, and the artifacts which carry significant meanings for the selected policy issue, should be identified. In this proposal, I included in the interpretive community those groups of policy-makers who have the power to pass or enforce laws and that have been involved in the reform of the Italian adult education system, such as the Parliament’s political forces, the government and the ministries. Policy documents produced by these actors have been then selected as artifacts: laws (N=3); executive decrees and ministerial circulars (N=9); European recommendations (N=3); and agreements (N=3). This corpus of policy documents helped me to answer especially the first two sub-questions The third sub-question instead, draws on other relevant policies and on the declarations of significant policy-makers. These background resources were helpful in order to interpret policy documents within their context and to reveal interdiscursive entanglements (Hayatt 2005). The corpus of national and European policy documents has been selected and interrogated by focussing “on the meanings of policies, on the values, feelings, or beliefs they express, and on the processes by which those meanings are communicated to and ‘read’ by various audiences” (Yanow 1999:14). Policy meanings have been mapped by systematically investigating both symbolic language, such as metaphors and set of categories; and symbolic objects, such as the commissions which are appointed in order to enact a programme. More specifically, the net of meanings has been uncovered through a discourse analysis, by the “identification and the interrogation of the binaries, key concepts and categories which operate within the policy” (Bacchi 2009:7). The aim of the discourse analysis was to uncover the representations of the problem embedded in the policy, to trace how these representations are constructed by different actors and in different policy documents, and to observe how they travel from a document to another. With this regard, policy documents engage in a sort of dialogue, through which they negotiate meanings and mediate on conflicting interpretations: each policy document refers to and acknowledges other documents. Through this process each document interprets the meanings and embraces, reframes or discards the discourses underpinning other documents.

The policy analysis is currently in progress. However, some insights are emerging, especially on two main aspects. Firstly, initial results have revealed a significant connection between the reform of the adult education system and austerity measures, active labour market policies and immigration policies. Therefore, it is expected to gain a deeper understanding of these linking mechanisms and interdiscursive context by the end of the analysis. Moreover, increased awareness is expected to be reached about how cultural, political and economic contextual factors influenced the entanglement of different policy areas and the use of adult education as a governance tool to address a variety of different social issues. Secondly, the analysis shows the rise of networks as governance structures, and traces how, over time, relational models gained prominence within the reorganisation of the Italian adult education system. CPIAs themselves are constructed as relational structures by the policy. More importantly, the reform of the CPIAs has been progressively intertwined with the Italian reform of the labour market, which in the same period embraced lifelong learning as a pivotal strategy for active labour market policies and set the scene for an integrated system of education, training and labour market services. All along the policy process, the CPIAs have been identified as points of reference for the coordination of this network of services. Consequently, a second expected outcome is a better understanding of the networking processes, their meanings and their connections with the European policies on lifelong learning. Overall, the policy analysis aims to explore the implication for action and agents which emerges from the discourses embedded in the policy; with this regard, the architecture of meaning expected to emerge from the analysis, could be a useful framework through which contextualise the practices and enactments of the policy at local level.

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