Praticare la governance nei territori dell’acqua: operatività e attuazione dei Contratti di Fiume

Abstract

Putting governance into practice in water territories

In Italy, the disciplinary evolution of water governance at the river basin scale has now reached a significant awareness and level of innovation, although it still shows some inertia, linked to the sectoral and infrastructuralist approach of the land, and due to physical-environmental, settlement and landscape, socio-cultural factors and, last but not least, to the Italian planning tradition. Despite the full body of regulations, planning and programming at the regional level for water, and the relevant innovations introduced by the River Contracts and in general by the culture of governance, there are still criticalities in the implementation of complex and multi-objective projects. The contribution discusses the issue of implementation through the case of a River Contract in southern Italy, exploring the operational possibilities of this tool in deploying a range of instruments and processes that consider the different awareness and intensity of collective action of communities. The activating of 'micro-governance', monitoring, implementation agreements and the flexibility of actions represent the components of an experimental and incremental process, examined as nodes of the governance instruments.

Keywords: river contracts, governance, implementation strategies