TITLE:
Re-Scaling the Socio-Ecological Italian Conflicts: Marginality as Arena of Practices
AUTHORS:
Alessandro Boldo, Raffaella Freschi
KEYWORDS:
Socio-Ecological Conflicts, Alienation, Caring Practice
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.2 No.11,
November
28,
2014
ABSTRACT: The progressive raising of socio-ecological conflicts in Italy and the ordinary abuse of “emergency regimes” are progressively contributing to the fragmentation of public sphere. In Italy, “territorial public action” has long since abandoned indeed the ability to arrange the goods according to the model of the Nation State and Welfare State: recent cases like ILVA in Taranto, the earthquake in L’Aquila, and the improper management of the “environmental regimes” testifying the growing of regional conflicts around distribution of bads and production of risks. Abusing of emergency regimes is becoming both a structural constraints and a strategy for Italian policies, forcing institutional rationality to set up umbrella concept—sustainable development for instance—, a body of international Law in its own right, but de facto proceed intentionally avoiding implementation processes, broadening space-temporal misfit, favoring negative cascade effects even on democracy spaces. Moreover, the vertical shift of political authority produces an enforcement of functional differentiations reducing the policy efforts for a multisectorial and multistakeholder approach, the occasions of citizenship and inclusion of public policies, enhancing on the opposite “territorial conflict” in collective resistance. The aim is not to test the validity of the best technique to solve territorial conflicts. Rather it is to show the right path of a counter-apparatus and the role of polycentric perspectives and micro-territorial practices enhancing cognitive processes on territorial policies and breaking up the organizational constraints of “emergentism”. Using small case studies stands out the role of marginality as “creative approaches” that increase the governance (and government) effectiveness of public action, turning on the interstices that link different functional domains. Those capabilities are not usual to public action itself, belonging rather to community of practices. We name these “caring practices”, able to foster opportunity to de-structuring consolidated bodies of knowledge and set an unusual interaction processes together with the institutions. These practices do not re-balance the conflicts, but are able to overturn territorial conflicts in a new “codex” of learning opportunities, helping to set up renewed political spaces widening the intensity of citizenship and generating territorial innovation.