Beyond the Rhetoric: Deconstructing Italy’s ‘Piano Mattei’ for Africa
Francesca Raffo
Francesca Raffo is a recent graduate in Local and Global Development from the University of Bologna. Her research focuses on the geopolitics and development, post-colonial relations, and the critical analysis of European and Italian foreign policies in Africa. This piece is adapted from her master’s thesis, which investigates the governance and strategic implications of the ‘Piano Mattei’ for Africa.
In a historical context where Africa, strengthened by its demographic dynamism, is increasingly the theatre of a fierce and multipolar competition driven by countries such as China, Turkey, and Russia, alongside the collapse of historic French influence, European countries face the urgency of redefining their paradigms of international cooperation. The EU has strategically responded to this urgency with the Global Gateway, while Italy puts forward the ‘Mattei Plan for Africa’ (hereafter, the Mattei Plan or simply the Plan).
Launched by the Italian Government in early 2024, the Mattei Plan for Africa has been heralded as a historic juncture in Italian-African relations: officially framed as a ‘non-predatory’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ partnership, the initiative claims to dismantle the paternalistic and exploitative paradigms that have long shadowed Western foreign policy in the Global South. However, as this analysis will demonstrate, the operational mechanics of the Plan risk reproducing the very asymmetrical power dynamics it claims to overcome.
The official framework articulates this ambition around six fundamental pillars: education, health, agriculture, water, energy, and physical and digital infrastructure. This is backed by an initial financial envelope of 5.5 billion euros. These resources, however, are largely drawn from the pre-existing Italian Climate Fund and ordinary development cooperation funds, deployed primarily as credits and guarantees rather than direct grants.
Institutional Architecture and the Illusion of Ownership
To determine whether the Mattei Plan genuinely fosters an equal partnership, one must scrutinise its institutional genesis. Established formally by Decree-Law 161/2023, the plan attempts to synchronise development, investments, energy interests, and migration control. While overcoming ministerial fragmentation is a methodological advancement, the distribution of power within its structural design tells a different story. A true partnership demands reciprocity and African ownership over the developmental agenda: in stark contrast, Mattei Plan was conceptualised in Rome and formally unveiled to African leaders without prior, structured consultation with the African Union or regional civil society networks. The governance architecture further amplifies this top-down nature, centralising coordination around a Cabina di Regia (Steering Committee) that privileges large Italian state-owned enterprises and financial institutions, leaving marginal space for African local actors.
Deconstructing the Myth and the Historical Void
The Mattei Plan does not emerge ahistorically but is rooted in the suppression of Italy’s colonial legacy. The official narrative relies heavily on the historical figure of Enrico Mattei, founder of the energy giant ENI and proponent of the revolutionary 75/25 approach against Cold War blocs, projecting the image of an Italy untainted by extractive greed. This narrative remains faithful to the familiar mechanism of historical self-absolution built around the myth of ‘italiani brava gente’ (the myth of the ‘good Italian colonisers’): by perpetuating the illusion of a benign colonialism, the national consciousness has been shielded from the brutal realities of imperial ventures. This explains why Italy has never truly reckoned with its colonial past, obscuring the highly ambiguous track record of Italian development cooperation. During the 1980s, this cooperation frequently devolved into ‘malacooperazione’ (‘bad cooperation’), characterised by tied aid, clientelism, and the construction of useless ‘cathedrals in the desert’. These were giants infrastructural projects entirely disconnected from local needs and lacking long-term maintenance, designed more to benefit Italian enterprises than to emancipate African communities.
The contemporary strategy must also be contextualised within the strategic void of the last two decades: following the 2011 collapse of the Libyan regime, Italy found itself lacking a coherent strategy towards Africa; this led to the dominance of an emergency-driven approach in the subsequent years, wherein the African continent was increasingly perceived not as a partner, but as a demographic and securitarian threat to be policed: the Mattei Plan attempts to rationalise this fragmented legacy, yet it risks struggling to detach itself from the ingrained habit of viewing Africa primarily as a reservoir of resources to tap into and a frontier to contain.
At present, within the confines of an initiative still in the making, an in-depth analytical reading of its historical roots, institutional framework, and empirical applications reveals a mixed and deeply uneven landscape. Approaching the plan with intellectual honesty and rejecting a priori judgements, one must acknowledge its structural merits, such as elevating the African dossier to the Prime Minister’s Office – a commendable departure from decades of fragmented bilateralism. However, a rigorous analysis demonstrates that, without paying attention to implicit junctures and unspoken historical continuities, the initiative risks reproducing deeply ingrained asymmetrical power and exploitation dynamics. Rather than a clean rupture with the past, it primarily safeguards Italian and European imperatives in energy security and migration containment under the renewed vocabulary of shared development.
A Systemic Approach: An Intersecting Framework
To truly grasp the operational essence of the Mattei Plan, however, it is essential to move beyond a compartmentalised reading of its official pillars. One must adopt a holistic vision of international relations that distances itself from the mere compartmentalisation of development policies and simple geographical subdivisions, arguing instead that structural problems do not operate as isolated entities but as knots within a complex network. By focusing on four specific, systematically interconnected sectors of intervention – agriculture, energy, digital transition, and institutional governance – a complex geometry emerges. In this matrix, energy constitutes the foundational and enabling infrastructure, the material prerequisite without which no agricultural hub or data centre could ever function. Similarly, digital innovation is the enabling infrastructure for modern agriculture and public administration, holding the potential to revolutionise food production and logistical efficiency. Yet, it inherently requires robust and autonomous data governance to prevent the African continent from sliding into a new form of technological dependency.
Yet, it inherently requires robust and autonomous data governance to prevent the African continent from sliding into a new form of technological dependency: it is precisely within this analytical framework that the strengthening of local administrative governance emerges as the absolute prerequisite. Without a strong, independent African public administration capable of regulating these overlapping sectors, the mere transfer of technology or the construction of ‘turnkey’ infrastructures will only generate structural dependence on external actors, thwarting any real prospect of endogenous development.
Empirical Dimension
The potential contradictions of the Italian approach become evident when examining the empirical applications of the Mattei Plan, observing its potential in an objective dialectic with its structural contradictions. The Centro Agroalimentare di Manica (CAAM) in Mozambique is frequently showcased as a flagship project capable of integrating smallholders into value chains. However, its financial and operational mechanics expose profound structural asymmetries: the project’s financial architecture relies overwhelmingly on aid credits for 35 million out of a 38-million-euro budget, imposing a thirty-year debt on the Mozambican state. Meanwhile, the infrastructure is to be delivered through a ‘turnkey’ contract awarded to Italian enterprises, excluding the local population from the design phase, bypassing the incremental building of local technical capacity, and reflecting the ‘policy capture’ phenomenon, wherein large infrastructural agreements prioritise the donor’s commercial interests over the recipient’s endogenous emancipation.
Although the Mattei Plan outlines a multisectoral approach, its gravitational centre remains inextricably tethered to energy, an interest repeatedly reaffirmed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni herself. This strategic priority exposes a critical contradiction: the pursuit of European energy security routinely relies on extractive logics that confine African nations to the role of raw material suppliers. Even within the framework of the green transition, these asymmetrical dynamics persist, as demonstrated by the ELMED project, a planned submarine high-voltage cable connecting Tunisia to Sicily. While acknowledging its technical rationality for stabilising the Tunisian grid, the collateral conditions conceal a stark imbalance: to facilitate this interconnection – officially presented as a bridge for shared decarbonisation – Tunisia is required to undertake massive debt to upgrade its internal grid. The evident risk is the externalisation of our ecological transition through green grabbing dynamics, wherein the African partner, currently heavily dependent on fossil fuels, assumes environmental burdens and debt to export clean energy to Europe.
The Piano Mattei also extends its reach into the digital realm, deploying projects like the Blue-Raman submarine cable system to link the Mediterranean directly to the Horn of Africa and the Indo-Pacific. While enhancing infrastructural resilience is a legitimate strategic goal, the transfer of technology without the transfer of governance may create a technological lock-in: unless African nations are equipped with robust data governance frameworks, digital expansion risks morphing into digital colonialism. Despite the accompaniment of initiatives like the AI Hub, useful for developing local datasets free of Western bias, without a real transfer of sovereignty in data governance, these networks risk becoming the colonial railways of the twenty-first century, generating new dependencies.
In administrative diplomacy, projects involving programmes such as the National School of Administration (SNA) for the strategic training of high-level officials may suggest a leap in vision regarding capacity building. However, the concurrent risk is that of educating African bureaucracies according to Western standards through a subtle soft-conditionality, potentially configuring a vehicle for penetration that ignores local peculiarities. Ultimately, the lack of civil society involvement currently evident in the project documents indicates the risk of strengthening liberal state apparatuses detached from the population; here, the true challenge will be to demonstrate that African institutional strengthening is a goal itself, especially when a stronger local administration becomes capable of negotiating better and more autonomous conditions, even with Italy itself.
Beyond infrastructure, the Government intricately links the public narrative of the Plan to migration control, despite this not being officially included in its pillars. The proposed narrative is to create favourable environments through such partnerships, granting people the ‘right not to emigrate’. Sociological evidence, however, explains that as populations’ conditions improve, emigration actually increases initially, precisely because individuals finally have the resources to pursue their preferred aspirations. Why, then, include this narrative in the public showcase of the Plan? The suspicion is one of instrumentalization and depoliticization of the migratory discourse.
Conclusions and Recommendations for a Genuine Paradigm Shift
The Piano Mattei currently stands at a fundamental crossroads: its formal establishment represents a concretely measurable effort to elevate Italy’s Africa policy to the highest institutional levels, yet its operational mechanics betray a substantial continuity with the past, frequently masking extractive logics and asymmetrical financial burdens behind the rhetoric of an equal partnership.
To accurately assess the Plan, specific evaluation criteria must be elaborated based on these premises. These criteria include a real reciprocity of exchanges, genuine partner ownership over projects, the local retention of added value as opposed to historical extractive logics, and institutional transparency. When measured against these parameters, the Italian initiative appears to configure itself more as a containment platform for pre-existing, disjointed projects relabelled under a single narrative, rather than a genuine horizontal macro-project. Furthermore, there is a risk that the Plan is not so much an organic development programme as a negotiation platform. Within this platform, Italy is guided by the legitimate yet overwhelming drive to internationalise its own enterprises, operating at the risk of generating marginal and dispersed benefits for local populations incapable of structural transformations.
If implemented in collaboration with civil society, the interventions have actual potential – a potential that, however, does not currently result in an overturning of past paradigms. Beyond good intentions, a lack of information reveals grey areas capable of disconnecting declarations from the reality of implementation, uncovering the possibility of gaps and contradictions between effective potential and limitations, such as the risk of subordinating objectives to other interests. The governance of the Plan risks replicating the vices of the 80s’ ‘malacooperazione’: centralised power, decisional opacity, and a Cabina di Regia still devoid of African representation, portraying Africa once again as an object of policy rather than a subject of partnership. For this initiative to truly shed its neocolonial undertones, a radical strategic realignment and change of direction is imperative.
First, there is an urgent need for greater transparency regarding project selection and implementation: this could be achieved through the establishment of a public, freely accessible platform that precisely tracks funding sources, the nature of the economic instruments employed, and the real implementation progress of each individual project, to ensure radical transparency, accountability, and continuous public monitoring.
Second, the consultation process must be structurally inverted to guarantee genuine and preventive African ownership: African partners, explicitly and bindingly including local civil society, must be actively involved from the very co-design phase through a bottom-up approach right from the conceptual stage, decentralising decision-making power from the restricted circle of the Cabina di Regia.
Third, Italy must establish rigorous institutional mechanisms capable of evaluating ex-ante the sustainability impact of all its policies. This ensures that, alongside the Principle of Policy Coherence, the desperate pursuit of energy security or the externalisation of border control does not short-circuit the declared development goals.
Fourth, a strategy harbouring continental ambitions cannot rely on a financial endowment of 5.5 billion euros, fragmented across multiple countries and years: a macroscopic and significant increase in funds allocated to development cooperation is necessary, clearly privileging grant operations.
Finally, any rhetoric built around the concept of an ‘equal partnership’ will inevitably sound hypocritical if it is not at last accompanied by a public and historical assumption of responsibility regarding Italy’s colonial past and the asymmetries it inexorably generated. A true partnership requires authentic political courage, and the responsibility of academic research and public debate today is precisely to unveil contradictions while there is still time to demand a change. Until these structural asymmetries are rigorously addressed and resolved, the Piano Mattei will remain a sophisticated rebranding of traditional power dynamics.
In this very spirit, this analytical assessment cannot limit itself to a static snapshot of a process still in the making; rather, it must establish itself as the starting point of a broader, permanent observatory capable of tracing the evolution of the project, thus becoming a tool for forecasting and support rather than mere ex-post judgment. Indeed, recent months have exposed a critical vulnerability, previously anticipated in the analysis, regarding the necessity of greater involvement of African countries. In the reports of the Second Italy-Africa Summit (February 2026), tellingly held in Addis Abeba, the headquarters of the African Union, there is explicit mention of the continent’s demand to be fully involved in defining priorities and implementing projects. Furthermore, several observers have highlighted that the Piano Mattei is evolving from an exclusively Italian initiative towards a multilateral Euro-African framework. The theme of ‘co-design’ has therefore become central, as many African governments seek to prevent the Plan from being perceived as an energy or migration strategy defined unilaterally by Rome or Brussels, explicitly demanding a more active, decisive, and equal role in governance and priority-setting. The evolution of the project will undoubtedly pass through political announcements and proclamations, but above all, through concrete steps and actual phases of operationalisation, such as the enactment of executive decrees or the drafting of specific projects. It is within these venues that it will be possible to measure whether a tangible transfer of governance occurs, or whether a masking of new forms of soft-conditionality prevails. Until these structural asymmetries are rigorously addressed and resolved, the Piano Mattei risks materialising into a sophisticated rebranding of policies already condemned by history.
Copyright, 2026, Francesca Raffo
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