Science, technology and international relations: case studies in Italian foreign policy

From the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, technological and scientific innovation played an increasingly critical role in shaping the cultural and economic modernization of Italy, as well as its capacity to remain a credible actor in the international scene. Yet, the crucial interaction between science, technology and diplomacy has been usually neglected by the academic literature. This project intends to close this gap by investigating some closely interconnected case studies which posed unprecedented challenges for Italian policy makers, as each one of them was deeply significant both for its domestic repercussions and for Italy’s international standing. It will look at the interplay between such fields as energy security, the environmental impact of energy choices, and the technological challenges of innovation in the aerospace and nuclear industries. A key feature of the project will be its focus on the interaction between technical experts and decision makers, to bypass the problematic methodological dichotomy caused by rigid approaches which tend to concentrate exclusively on either one of these categories. The availability of some hitherto unavailable archival sources, and the extensive use of interviews, will allow the project to move beyond these conceptual rigidities.

The project has produced two open access publications, both of which will be published by March 2025:

Federico Paolini, Francesco Sanna, Gli scienziati, gli esperti e l’ambiente. Il caso italiano, 1950-1990, FrancoAngeli, Milano 2025

Jingyuan Wu (ed.), Scientists and the Establishment of a Mass Environmental Awareness (1950-1990), tab edizioni, Roma 2025

Below we present a synthesis of the research findings:

Scientists, Environmental Awareness, and the Politics of Knowledge: Rethinking the Italian Case in a Global Perspective

Science, Politics, and the Environmental Question

Environmental awareness did not emerge spontaneously. Between the 1950s and the 1990s it was constructed through a complex interaction between scientific knowledge, political institutions, industrial interests, mass culture, and environmental movements. The results of the PRIN research project Science, Technology and International Relations: Case Studies in Italian Foreign Policy have tried to reconstruct this process by analysing the role played by scientists and experts in the formation of environmental consciousness, with particular attention to the Italian case and its global connections.

The research produced two interconnected volumes: Gli scienziati, gli esperti e l’ambiente. Il caso italiano, 1950-1990 and Scientists and the Establishment of a Mass Environmental Awareness (1950-1990). Together, they explore how scientific expertise became increasingly central to public debates on pollution, ecological crisis, industrial development, nuclear energy, and environmental policy between the postwar period and the end of the Cold War.

Rather than presenting environmentalism as a linear moral awakening, the research highlights the existence of deep tensions and asymmetries of power. Scientific knowledge was never politically neutral. Experts operated within systems shaped by economic interests, ideological conflicts, institutional rivalries, and media representations. At the same time, environmental movements often simplified or emotionally reinterpreted scientific concepts in order to mobilize public opinion.

This historical perspective is particularly important today because contemporary environmental debates continue to oscillate between scientific authority, political instrumentalization, and mass communication.

The Italian Case: A Neglected Historical Laboratory

One of the central findings of the research is that the Italian case represents an important but largely neglected laboratory for understanding the relationship between science and environmental awareness.

Italian historiography has traditionally dedicated limited attention to the interactions between scientists, institutions, and environmental politics in the second half of the twentieth century. The research therefore attempted to reconstruct a fragmented historical landscape in which experts, research institutions, industrial actors, political parties, and environmental organizations interacted in unstable and often conflictual ways.

Postwar Italy was characterized by a contradictory relationship with science. On the one hand, scientific and technological modernization were considered essential instruments for economic growth, industrialization, and international prestige. On the other hand, scientists frequently operated in conditions of institutional weakness, limited funding, political interference, and cultural marginalization.

The Italian university system remained heavily conditioned by traditional humanistic cultures, while scientific institutions often struggled to acquire autonomy and stable public legitimacy. The result was a persistent tension between scientific expertise and political power.

During the 1950s and 1960s, science became increasingly politicized. The Cold War transformed scientific research into a strategic field connected to nuclear energy, technological modernization, industrial productivity, and geopolitical competition. Italian scientific institutions such as the CNR, the CNEN, and the Istituto Superiore di Sanità became arenas where political parties, industrial interests, and scientific elites competed for influence.

The environmental question emerged inside this broader context. Ecological concerns did not initially challenge the dominant ideology of economic growth. Instead, many scientists attempted to reconcile industrial development with environmental protection, proposing technical solutions capable of reducing pollution without fundamentally transforming the economic system.

This aspect is crucial because it complicates simplified narratives that oppose “good environmentalism” to “bad industrial modernity.” The research demonstrates that environmental awareness was constructed through negotiations, contradictions, and strategic compromises.

Scientists Between Visibility and Marginality

A second major result of the research concerns the ambiguous public role of scientists.

Contrary to the widespread perception that experts dominated environmental debates, the research shows that scientists often remained surprisingly marginal in the public sphere. Their concrete work inside laboratories, research commissions, and technical institutions rarely attracted media attention. Public debates instead tended to privilege sensationalist narratives, ideological polarization, and simplified representations of ecological problems.

Many scientists became increasingly frustrated by this situation during the 1970s. While environmentalism was gaining visibility, scientific expertise was frequently filtered through political conflicts and emotional communication.

The research identifies different responses among scientists.

Some embraced forms of “militant science,” openly participating in environmental campaigns and public controversies. Others defended a technocratic vision centred on expertise, planning, and rational management of resources. Still others criticized the radicalization of environmental movements, considering anti-industrial and anti-scientific tendencies potentially dangerous.

This fragmentation reveals that “the scientific community” never acted as a unified actor. Scientists were internally divided by disciplinary cultures, political orientations, institutional affiliations, and competing interpretations of the ecological crisis.

The Italian debate therefore reflected broader international transformations. Across the Western world, the environmental crisis contributed to undermining the optimistic narratives of postwar modernization. Faith in technological progress began to coexist with growing anxieties about pollution, nuclear risks, urban degradation, overconsumption, and ecological collapse.

Environment, Industry, and the State

Another important dimension of the research concerns the relationship between environmental knowledge and industrial capitalism.

The case of ENI and its subsidiary Tecneco illustrates how large industrial actors attempted to position themselves as producers of environmental expertise during the 1970s. Rather than simply opposing environmental regulation, some industrial sectors sought to integrate ecological concerns into managerial and technological strategies.

This process contributed to the emergence of new forms of environmental governance centred on technical planning, data collection, environmental monitoring, and scientific consultancy.

The preparation of the first reports on the state of the environment represented a decisive turning point because environmental degradation became increasingly measurable, quantifiable, and administratively visible. Pollution was transformed into a political category that required institutional responses.

At the same time, however, the research shows the fragility of these processes.

Projects frequently encountered bureaucratic resistance, political instability, economic constraints, and ideological conflict. The environmental policies of the Italian state developed slowly and unevenly. The creation of the Ministry of the Environment in the 1980s represented an important symbolic achievement, but institutional fragmentation and limited resources continued to weaken environmental governance.

The Italian case therefore demonstrates that environmental awareness alone does not automatically produce effective environmental policies. Knowledge must pass through political structures, economic interests, institutional cultures, and social conflicts.

A Global Perspective on Environmental Awareness

The second volume of the research expanded the analysis beyond Italy by connecting European and Asian case studies.

This comparative perspective highlights an essential point: environmental awareness was never simply “exported” from one part of the world to another. Instead, it emerged through transnational circulations of scientific knowledge, local experiences, political struggles, and cultural reinterpretations.

The Asian case studies reveal how pollution, industrialization, and environmental conflict generated different temporalities of ecological awareness. In Japan, China, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines, scientific expertise interacted with local knowledge, indigenous resistance, and postcolonial political dynamics.

Environmental consciousness therefore developed through asymmetrical but multidirectional exchanges.

The research adopts what can be described as a “history from between,” emphasizing the spaces of interaction connecting local and global actors. This perspective rejects simplistic models of diffusion in which scientific knowledge moves unidirectionally from centres to peripheries.

Instead, environmental awareness appears as the result of negotiations between scientists, institutions, communities, activists, industries, and cultural mediators operating across different scales.

This approach also allows us to rethink environmental history itself.

For many decades environmental history often remained strongly connected to activist cultures and ecocentric paradigms. The PRIN research instead proposes a more complex interpretation capable of integrating political history, cultural history, global history, and the history of science.

Environmental debates were not only conflicts about nature. They were also struggles over authority, legitimacy, expertise, development, and social power.

Pop Culture and the Circulation of Ecological Ideas

One of the most original dimensions of the research concerns the role of popular culture in spreading environmental awareness.

Scientific concepts rarely reached mass audiences in their original complexity. Instead, music, television, cinema, magazines, and youth cultures translated ecological anxieties into emotionally powerful narratives.

The analysis of musical productions by groups such as The Kinks and Alberto Camerini demonstrates how environmental themes became intertwined with counterculture, anti-scientific attitudes, critiques of consumer society, and alternative visions of everyday life during the 1970s.

Popular culture simplified scientific debates but also amplified them. Ecological ideas circulated globally through symbolic forms capable of reaching audiences far beyond academic and institutional contexts.

This process transformed environmentalism into a mass cultural phenomenon.

However, the research also underlines the ambiguities of this transformation. The diffusion of ecological consciousness through popular culture often encouraged emotional and subjective perceptions detached from scientific complexity. In some cases, environmental narratives merged with broader forms of anti-modern or anti-scientific sentiment.

These tensions remain visible today in contemporary debates surrounding climate change, public health, technology, and sustainability.

Rethinking Environmental Awareness Today

The research ultimately suggests that environmental awareness should not be interpreted as the inevitable triumph of scientific rationality.

The ecological crisis emerged through unstable interactions between scientific expertise, political conflict, industrial transformation, media representation, and cultural imagination. Scientists did not simply “discover” environmental problems and communicate them to society. Instead, environmental awareness was co-produced through negotiations involving multiple actors operating within asymmetrical relations of power.

This historical reconstruction also invites us to reconsider the role of expertise in democratic societies.

Scientific knowledge remains indispensable for understanding environmental transformations, yet it never operates outside ideological, economic, and institutional frameworks. Public debates continuously reshape the meaning of scientific authority.

The Italian case shows both the possibilities and the limits of technocratic environmental governance. Expertise can help identify ecological risks, produce data, and formulate policies, but environmental problems cannot be separated from social conflicts, political priorities, and cultural values.

From this perspective, the history of environmental awareness becomes part of a broader global history of power, knowledge, and mass culture.

It reveals how modern societies attempted to reconcile economic growth, technological progress, scientific authority, and ecological limits during the second half of the twentieth century. The tensions generated by this process remain unresolved and continue to shape contemporary debates on climate change, sustainability, energy transition, and environmental justice.