The Pontignano Conference XXXII (November 2024)
This year’s Pontignano Conference is the 32nd edition. It will be held in Rome rather than in its usual venue in Tuscany, and in a slightly shorter format over two days from 28 – 29 November 2024. In Italy’s G7 Presidency year, with such substantial international and bilateral engagement planned in Italy throughout 2024, this should make it easier for many of our Italian participants to join us. We are planning to return to the conference’s usual venue near Siena in 2025.
This year, the overarching theme for the conference will be “Creating Opportunities”, with a particular focus on growth and supporting greater collaboration in key sectors for both the UK and Italy. The conference will include workshop sessions addressing:
Opportunities for addressing regional, demographic and social disparities: recognising the significant challenges the UK and Italy face in regional and social inequality, alongside an ageing population, and considering the approaches that could effectively reduce these disparities and support long-term economic growth, including how to attract investment into regions and the role of industrial strategies.
Geopolitics, with a focus on the role of the G7: considering the future role of the G7 including in relation to international challenges such as climate change, energy security and supply chains, and migration.
The creative economy: reimagining growth and prosperity through identifying where the most mutually beneficial opportunities for joint innovation and collaboration between creative organisations in the UK and Italy lie, and how they can contribute to more inclusive and sustainable societies.
Higher Education partnerships, transnational education and student mobility: reflecting on the longstanding educational connections between the UK and Italy, and how Transnational Education partnerships can lead to collaborative international research, new mobility opportunities and more inclusive and internationalised education.
In addition, we will have our customary conference sessions considering the most recent economic data and opinion poll trends in Italy and the UK, as well as on trends we should expect to see in 2025 and beyond.
Following the 2023 launch of our UK-Italy Young Leaders Programme, many of our first cohort of young leaders, announced in March 2023, will be joining us at the conference. We are looking forward to working with them on thematic issues of most importance to the UK and Italy.
