X Relazione sullo stato della montagna italiana

Topics

• Policies and instruments

Abstract

The volume follows the former studies devoted to the Italian mountain situation published since 1995 (in accordance with the Law n. 97 approved on January 31st 1994). Divided into six chapters, the volume presents an interesting and complete description of the main national, regional and intermediate (like “Mountain Communities”) institutional actors deal with mountain areas, the legislative framework and the most relevant national and regional policies regard the Alpine bow and the most important Italian and European projects regards mountain areas. The volume focuses on to the economic resources allotted to the different mountain projects. The analysis of the different measures adopted by the national, regional and local actors covers a large variety of themes from agricultural and forest policy to environment and territory protection and from tourism development to water system. It is necessary to precise that, since the Italian legislation is characterized by a high degree of fragmentation, many sectoral policies were allocated to different actors. Moreover, it could be said that central state maintains the control over general framework legislation, while Regions are fully responsible for enacting it with special regional legislation. Inside the Regional structure, the volume presents the structure of the administrative framework and indicates the board responsible for any sectoral competences. The third part of the study analyses the range of legislative instruments (like Alpine Convention or Espace Mont Blanc), programmes (like Structural funds) and projects (like Leader+ or Interreg) supported by the European Union. The description and presentation of the institutional actors that do research and studies about mountain area in Italy (like universities, Mountain National Institute, Unimont or National Statistic Institute), a national and international web site list refers to mountain and a statistic appendix complete the volume. The volume presents some interesting remarks about impacts of rural development and structural policies in the Italian mountain area. According to the text, the European policies present many deficiencies as they do not refer directly to agriculture or rural development in the mountain areas. The development policies are also undifferentiated since they do not identify priorities for each mountain areas which are significantly different. According to the text, e.g. in the structural funds programme, except for the “compensative indemnity measure” devoted to disadvantages areas, there are no trace of specific mountain areas policies: thus actions and measures for mountain areas have to be related to the general framework of rural development policies. The Agenda 2000 reform has introduced some important innovation in the rural development policies, which are related with mountain areas. The volume assesses that the “compensative indemnity measure”, that is positively considered as an instrument to maintain the agricultural land use in disadvantages areas, is not sufficient to invert the current dynamics.

Most relevant parts of the publication

Chapters 1, 2, 4 (point 4.3)