Speaker
Description
This contribution proposes a critical analysis of the acronyms and operational tools that describe the package of measures, actions and projects implemented with the resources allocated by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), the instrument through which the ‘Next Generation EU’ European plan (the programme with which Europe responded to the pandemic crisis) was territorialised in Italy. The purpose of this analysis is to investigate the relationship between public policies and the operational tools they make use of, in order to reflect on the effects they produce on the territories, through textual analysis - the explicitness of words, their recurrence (or not) in institutional documents, the possible ambivalent meanings they take on - and the parallel spatial mapping of inertia and territorial transformations.
In particular, we examine a wide-ranging research programme, financed with PNRR funds, which involves, in an ‘extended partnership’, several universities, research centres and companies: the network called ‘GRINS’, an acronym for Growing Resilient, Inclusive and Sustainable. This case study allows us a privileged point of view, since each of the authors of this contribution is involved with a different role within this research network. The deconstruction and critical analysis work looks at the PE9 partnership within the broader system of European funding allocated through the Next Generation EU (NGEU), also known as the European Green Deal. The pact was endorsed by the European Commission in 2019, when member states committed themselves to a process of converting their once prosperous and linear growth into a sustainable and virtuous development process. On the contrary, in the PNRR, approved after the pandemic emergency, the words recovery and resilience refer to the capacity of a system to resist, adapt and recover its form after traumatic events, denouncing the state of crisis and the need to cope with the effects generated by the pandemic on economies and territories.
An analysis of the acronyms and words most frequently used in the two documents reveals a shift in the focus of the issue: climate, ecology, the environment and the green transition, central in the former, assume marginal importance in the latter, which highlights the need for reforms and territorial investments instrumental to recovery.
As in the use of the term territory, which in its adjectival derivation is reduced to a background presence, so in the GRINS proposal for the implementation of a database, to which the description of the territory is entrusted, space is represented through an abstraction. This contribution, reflecting the research approach of the DiARC unit within the GRINS project, highlights the need to integrate this perspective by restituting the material system, woven with tangible and intangible relationships. This system is not merely a locus of sovereign authority for implementing the actions outlined in the Plan.
The absence or disappearance of the terms Landscape and Ecosystem, that is, precisely those devices constituted by the relations themselves and in which rights and interests intersect, denounces the reversal of priorities and ambitions of the Plan and its implementation tools.
The problem therefore arises of restoring the complexity of territorial systems, dynamic configurations of relationships in which flows, interactions and interdependencies intertwine, within data-informed processes.
This investigation into the vocabulary of premises and the use of tools aims to bring to attention the territorial specificities and the otherwise unexpressed needs of the plurality of instances involved in transformation processes that produce significant effects on the socio-ecological cohesion of territories.
| Keywords | Spatial sustainability, site specific, ecological transition |
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