In the face of the disturbance and impact of risk society, focusing on the endogenous advantages and spillover risks of community systems, it is necessary to enhance community attachment through resilience enhancement to promote the modernization of grassroots governance in the new era. Based on the nesting of new endogenous development theory and resilience governance theory, a coupling resilience system (CRS) theoretical framework of resilience empowering community attachment is constructed to explore the influence of internal and external coupling of endogenous and exogenous resilience on community attachment, and to judge the operation logic of resilience governance in the community field. The study found that both exogenous and endogenous resilience have a positive impact on community attachment; psychological resilience plays a partial mediating role in the influence of technical resilience and organizational resilience on community attachment; cultural resilience positively moderates the relationship between technical resilience, organizational resilience, psychological resilience and community attachment. In order to further play the role of resilience in promoting community attachment, the effectiveness of institutional resilience empowerment should be enhanced to promote the coupling coordination of three-dimensional subsystems; the redundancy of residents' psychological resilience should be improved to strengthen the endogenous dynamics of community attachment; Consolidate the foundation of community cultural resilience and gather consensus on risk governance values.

The theme of immigration is perhaps one of the most fertile grounds for reflecting on the potential of diversity as a vector for improving administrative and public action in general. This paper intends to demonstrate this assumption starting from a reflection on the historical genesis of the reception of people migrating to Italy and on the “Riace” experience: both reveal, in fact, the possibility of an approach to immigration based on openness to diversity and, in parallel, of a conflict - still ongoing - between legislation and practice that continues to undermine this possibility, if not when it prevents it at the root, as in the Riace case. The delay and impermeability of the former prevent the many and numerous experiences of “good” reception from becoming a system and a network through adequate support and resources, which also passes through a non-securitarian and emergency approach to the issue. The focus of reflection will therefore be on social and civil mobilisation as a forge of models and experiences of successful coexistence. Lastly, we will discuss possible tools capable of enhancing and strengthening this aspect, looking first and foremost at town assemblies, understood as a participation tool capable not only of uniting the resident population - with or without citizenship - and providing it with a means of direction and expression that is additional and unrelated to the electoral vote, but also of strengthening and improving action in a fruitful and constant dialogue.

Research in the public sector has largely overlooked the experiences of LGBT+ citizens (Larson, 2022; Meyer and Milleson, 2022). This oversight is concerning, considering that LGBT+ people frequently encounter inequality and discrimination (Bayrakdar & King, 2023). While public sector organizations are tasked with promoting social equity in the provision of public services (Andrews and Van de Walle, 2013), our understanding of how public sector organizations acknowledge and address the needs of LGBT+ citizens remains limited.

Some studies show that organizations often lack knowledge about LGBT+ issues (Roelofs et al., 2019) and tend to advocate a one-size-fits-all approach (Caceres et al., 2020). At the same time, practices to improve the inclusion and social equity of LGBT+ citizens have been introduced, but we know little about the extent to which they have become normalized (e.g., Pijpers and Honsbeek, 2023). One potential factor of importance concerns a particularity of LGBT+ identities. In contrast to, for example, gender or ethnicity, LGBT+ people more often consider whether to present or hide their identities (i.e., whether they ‘come out’; Hall et al., 2021).

Hence, there is a knowledge gap regarding whether public sector organizations are aware of and responsive to the concerns of the LGBT+ community, and how the LGBT+ community itself deals with this by coming out to public sector workers or not. Therefore, we aim to study whether and how explicitly presenting a LGBT+ identity affects the service provision of public sector organizations.

We test this in a large-scale audit experiment (Crabtree, 2018) in The Netherlands and (Flemish) Belgium. Various hypothetical people will contact public elderly care homes. All people make an inquiry related to their parent, a potential client, whose identity varies randomly: no explicit identity (baseline), a gay man, a lesbian woman, or a transgender person. This allows to test whether various aspects of service provision are affected by an ‘identification effect’ of LGBT+ citizens (Kirgios et al., 2022). In sum, our study contributes to the literature by studying how public sector organizations work on the social equity of LGBT+ citizens.

LGBTI+ people are still a vulnerable social group that needs special attention as they are still discriminated against, even if some improvements have been registered throughout the past decades in some countries (Flores, 2019; FRA, 2020; Gato et al., 2021; ILGA World, 2020; Mota & Fernandes, 2021; Roberts, 2019).

Portugal is no exception to this trend. On the one hand, Portugal has one of the best scores in the so-called ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Map in 2022. On the other hand, the results of the European Social Survey demonstrate that LGBTI+ people still face significant societal discrimination in this country. The results from the Round 9 [2018] of this survey reveal that there is still a considerable percentage of the surveyed population who think gays and lesbians should not live as they wish (16.5%; points 3, 4 and 5 in a 1-5 scale) or who would feel ashamed if a close family member was gay or lesbian (23.6%; same scale). These latter results are much higher than in other western European countries, such as Norway (6.7%), the Netherlands (6.8%), Denmark (8.0%), Sweden (12.8%) or even Spain (13.3%). Furthermore, in a study developed by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA, 2020), 20% of the surveyed Portuguese LGBTI+ people claimed to have felt discriminated against at work due to being LGBTI.

If these general results are already a matter of concern, it is not difficult to anticipate the situation may be even more problematic in more peripheral territories, not only because there could be more conservative communities in such territories but also because most services targeting LGBTI+ people are placed in bigger cities (Hartal, 2015; Binnie, 2016; Eleftheriadis, 2017; Stone, 2018) – for instance, the only community centre for LGBTI+ people in Portugal is located in Lisbon. However, it is not possible to know this for sure as all the mentioned surveys do not ask respondents about their place of residence.

Taking this situation into consideration, a project named “Centre Region out of Closet” (a project with ILGA-Portugal) is currently analysing the needs and challenges related to the integration of LGBTI+ people in the Centre Region of Portugal (NUTS II, with around 2.2 million people). To do so, we launched two online surveys: one on LGBTI+ people – with a selection of questions from the survey launched by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (2020), which enables us to compare the national and regional results; and another on public and social services (e.g., NGOs, health care centres, schools, municipalities, and inter-municipal communities), which were launched in articulation with Social Action Local Councils (CLAS). The first survey aims to understand the struggles and needs that LGBTI+ people experience and the second one to assess to what extent the mentioned services have programs targeting the integration of LGBTI+ people and what are their main challenges in doing so (e.g., lack of interest from the general community, lack of funds or human resources, or lack of training).

This presentation will explore the main preliminary results of both surveys.

References

Binnie, Jon (2016). “Critical queer regionality and LGBTQ politics in Europe”. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 23(11): 1631-1642. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2015.1136812

Eleftheriadis, Konstantinos (2017). “Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Sexual Politics in the European Periphery: a Multiscalar Analysis of Gay Prides in Thessaloniki, Greece”. International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 30: 385–398. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-016-9243-5

Flores, Andrew R. (2019). Social acceptance of LGBT people in 174 countries, 1981 to 2017. Los Angeles: The Williams Institute. https://escholarship.org/content/qt5qs218xd/qt5qs218xd.pdf

FRA - European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (2020). A long way to go for LGBTI equality. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. https://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2020/eu-lgbti-survey-results#publication-tab-1

Gato, Jorge, Jaime Barrientos, Fiona Tasker, Marina Miscioscia, Elder Cerqueira-Santos, , Anna Malmquist, Daniel Seabra, Daniela Leal, Marie Houghton, Mikael Poli, Alessio Gubello, Mozer de Miranda Ramos, Mónica Guzmán, Alfonso Urzúa, Francisco Ulloa & Matilda Wurm (2021). “Psychosocial Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Mental Health among LGBTQ+ Young Adults: A Cross-Cultural Comparison across Six Nations”. Journal of Homosexuality, 68(4): 612-630. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2020.1868186

Hartal, Gilly (2015). “Becoming Periphery - Israeli LGBT “Peripheralization” “. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(2), 571-597. Retrieved from https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1101

ILGA World: Lucas Ramon Mendos, Kellyn Botha, Rafael Carrano Lelis, Enrique López de la Peña, Ilia Savelev and Daron Tan (2020). State-Sponsored Homophobia 2020: Global Legislation Overview Update. Geneva: ILGA. https://ilga.org/state-sponsored-homophobia-report-2020-global-legislation-overview

Mota, Luís F. & Bruna Fernandes (2021) “Debating the law of self-determination of gender identity in Portugal: composition and dynamics of advocacy coalitions of political and civil society actors in the discussion of morality issues”. Social Politics, advance papers: 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxab015

Roberts, Louisa L. (2019). “Changing worldwide attitudes toward homosexuality: The influence of global and region-specific cultures, 1981–2012”. Social Science Research, 80: 114-131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2018.12.003

Stone, Amy L. (2018). “The Geography of Research on LGBTQ Life: Why sociologists should study the South, rural queers, and ordinary cities”. Sociology Compass, 12(11). https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12638