The Bureaucratic Trap: Registered Residence and Sedentist Bias in Italian Social Cohesion Policies for Roma and Sinti

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of sedentist bias in development by exploring nuances and contradictions in local social cohesion policies that target the Roma and Sinti population in Italy. European cohesion policies are embedded in a decades-long history of development discourses aimed at economically underdeveloped regions within Europe as well as vulnerable social groups. The latter include groups like Roma and Sinti, who, although historically part of the European social fabric, are not always treated as such due to their alleged legacy of nomadism. We address interactions and hiccups between the policies for Roma/Sinti implemented by Italian regions and municipalities and the directives for Roma inclusion stipulated by national and EU frameworks. We argue that the translation of these directives meets and intersects with a pre-existing legislative framework consisting of regional policies for Roma and Sinti based on soft recognition and mainstream policies that revolve around an administrative milieu that aims at controlling identity and mobility within national borders. We thus reflect on registered residence, an administrative device that is used as a selective tool for granting access to citizenship rights, and on its effects on Italy's local social cohesion policies for Roma and Sinti. The implementation of EU and national frameworks for Roma cohesion, which is our main argument, can paradoxically contribute to the exclusion and marginalisation of mobile peoples in Italy. This is due to a sedentist framework in which the mechanism of registered residence, a bureaucratic trap for many Roma and Sinti, becomes extremely apparent and prompts a series of more implicit biases in local social policies.