From participation to imagination: youth futures and the deliberative making of Inland Areas

This paper adopts Future Labs (Pellegrino, 2020) as an innovative methodological device at the intersection of Social Representations Theory (SRT; Moscovici, 1961) and political science. The aim is to investigate how young people imagine and negotiate alternative futures for inland areas, based on their engagement with a policy-lab. The analysis builds on the project YES I AM-Youth Engagement for Supporting Inland Areas Management, which addressed structural challenges such as outmigration, service scarcity, and weak civic participation in inland areas. Within this framework, attention is placed on the School of Rurality, where 50 young people from across Italy co-developed policy proposals for inland areas, focusing on physical and digital infrastructures, cultural heritage, agri-food, and social services. Future Labs are therefore conducted as backcasting exercises (Pellegrini, 2016; Bibri, 2018), with the School of Rurality participants, aiming to build collective spaces for reflection, imagination, and negotiation. Participants are asked to visualize the future of inland areas if current trajectories remain unchanged. They are then invited to construct an alternative future in which their policy proposals have been fully implemented. By juxtaposing "probable" and "ideal" futures, latent conflicts and power dynamics become visible: particularly the struggles over agenda-setting and the authority to define which representations of the future gain legitimacy (Castro & Mouro, 2016; Howarth, 2006). Through a SRT epistemology, we consider social representations emerging in these discussions as not only expressed but also co-produced, through the interplay of hegemonic, emancipated, and polemical representations of inland areas and their future (Moscovici, 1988). In this sense, Future Labs operate as discursive arenas of the public sphere where public opinion dynamics unfold. They reveal how collective representations are negotiated, contested, and stabilized in relation to broader structures of power (Trenz, 2024). The contribution advances a dialogue between SRT and deliberative policy studies, reinterpreting citizens not as passive recipients of policies but as stakeholders and co-decision makers in rural governance. Young people, in this perspective, emerge as agents of change. Their collective representations, sustained by digital and physical networks, challenge established policy narratives and broaden the horizon of possibilities for territorial development. By integrating SRT with 95 political science, the paper enriches the understanding of both cognitive and political dimensions of participation, offering new insights into the role of youth in shaping democratic futures for Europe's inland areas (Habermas, 1989).