Infrastructures of Listening. The case of the Municipality of Milan in reframing qualitative monitoring as situated anticipatory governance in youth policies.

Public administrations working on youth policy and school-to-work transitions typically monitor their interventions through retrospective quantitative indicators, which project past trends onto the future and render the “lived futures” of young people invisible. This paper proposes shifting from predictive metrics to anticipatory governance, operationalised through qualitative monitoring understood as a situated infrastructure of listening. It examines the “Testing Action” developed by the Youth Promotion and School-to-Work Transition Project Management of the Municipality of Milan, which prototypes and compares three participatory, visual and narrative methods (most significant change, photovoice, research wall), alongside an internal “mini-academy” for public servants. The argument is twofold. First, when guided by an ethic of care, qualitative monitoring becomes an educational infrastructure that supports young people’s futures literacy and capacity to aspire. Second, the stories, frictions and emotions it captures act as weak signals, enabling the institution to move from a logic of plan and control to one of sense and respond. The paper introduces the concept of “Anticipatory Care” an institutional posture that redistributes epistemic power by recognising young people as the experts of their own futures. The case shows that anticipatory governance does not require sophisticated algorithmic tools, but can emerge from the careful design of everyday practices of listening, documenting and interpreting.