ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Planning in emergency: building institutional capacity in rural municipalities through Next Generation EU in Italy

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 04 | GOVERNANCE

Speaker

Dr Francesca Sabatini (Department of Architecture - Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna)

Description

Next Generation EU, translated into National Recovery and Resilience Plans, stands in Italy as the first ambitiously funded opportunity for territorial regeneration in decades. It consists of six missions (to which the REPower EU directive was recently added) covering the digital transition and innovation, infrastructures, health, education, social inclusion and the green transition (Italiadomani, nd). Within the innovation mission, the investment for rural towns under 5000 inhabitants stands as a unique chance to address depopulation in Italy's inner areas, and presented municipalities with an unprecedented subsidy for local, culture-driven regeneration projects. Falling under the responsibility of the Ministry for Culture, the funding took the name of “Bando Borghi”(a “Call for Rural Towns”), under which projects were divided into two funding streams: “line A”, which funded 21 pilot projects in rural towns with a massive inflow of resources (21 million € for each town), and “line B”, which funded “local social and cultural regeneration projects”. 295 municipalities were awarded a maximum of 2.5 million € for their projects (Oteri, Pracchi 2023).
At least two major challenges characterized this investment: the first is the lack of a long-term planning strategy able to address systematically a systematic problem, whose scale is more territorial and regional than municipal; the second is the dramatic lack of administrative capacity of the local governments: having been understaffed and poorly trained for decades, municipalities further lacked administrative support from the side of the Ministry of Culture, any other intermediate level of governance being mostly absent. At the same time, however, the investment paved the way for actions which, from the bottom-up, attempted to reconcile the planning dimension at a broader territorial level with the stitching of emergency funding, such as the “Bando Borghi”: on the one hand, Municipal authorities reconnected their projects with broader territorial strategies, expanding the reach of the project beyond the limited timeframe of Next Generation (whose deadline is set to 2026); on the other, they developed public-private partnerships within the project which allowed for capacity building, as well as institutional and social innovation (Viesti 2023).
The research will look at these “planning attempts” in times of emergency by observing one of the projects funded within “line B” of “Bando Borghi” in Sicily. The first part of the research will present the theoretical framework, grounded on institutional innovation (Morgan 2007; Vargo et al. 2020) and territorial planning (Sartorio 2005; Landini 2021); it will then introduce the Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan and the “Bando Borghi”. Through direct, participant observation to the initiatives, in the thrid part it will shed a light on the challenges faced during the design and governance of the project, and on the possibilities offered by institutional interactions with other planning strategies and with the project stakeholders. The conclusive part will discuss results in the light of the theoretical framework and reflect on the transformative implications of Next Generation EU in the Italian context of territorial planning.

References

Fabbrini, S. (2021). La governance del PNRR e il governo dell’Italia. LUISS.
Italiadomani. Il Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (nd). Available at https://www.italiadomani.gov.it/content/sogei-ng/it/it/home.html. Accessed Dec, 17th, 2024.
Landini, P. (2021). Geography and Territorial Planning in Italy. Geographies of Mediterranean Europe, 77-101
Morgan, K. (2007). The learning region: institutions, innovation and regional renewal. Regional studies, 41(S1), S147-S159.
Oteri, A. M., & Pracchi, V. N. (2023). L’insostenibile fascino dei borghi. Primi dati e una riflessione sugli esiti del bando “Attrattività dei borghi storici”. ArcHistoR, (19), 162-201.
Sartorio, F. S. (2005). Strategic spatial planning: A historical review of approaches, its recent revival, and an overview of the state of the art in Italy. DisP-The Planning Review, 41(162), 26-40.
Vargo, S. L., Akaka, M. A., & Wieland, H. (2020). Rethinking the process of diffusion in innovation: A service-ecosystems and institutional perspective. Journal of business research, 116, 526-534.
Viesti, G. (2023). Riuscirà il PNRR a rilanciare l'Italia?. Donzelli editore.