Valutazione ambientale strategica e governance territoriale: metodologie e procedure

The concepts of governance and sustainable development on which the thesis is based, are present in the literature with various meanings and are often misused in everyday language, so as to be regarded by many as words full of rhetoric, ambiguous, devoid of any real content, used to express everything and nothing. The likely cause of this misuse is that they are concepts related to complex systems and processes, in terms of problems and implications, with a variety of people involved in different ways and whose number has increased over time. While the concept of sustainability in the administration of the territory goes beyond the protection of the environment by including economic and social development as well as the environmental dimension, the analysis of the territorial governance processes requires the reconstruction of behaviour of the multiple participants, called stakehorders, which act in these processes. An important governance tool, useful in guiding the plan of action to the paradigm of sustainable development, is the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA). Compared to its relationship with governance, the SEA could be defined as a set of rules, principles, techniques and tools with the function of continually supporting the decision making process in order to generate consensus on actions to be taken and, above all, to ensure that such consent will last over time and become a network of stable relationships that can ensure continuity and consistency in the planning process. Governance, evaluation and planning are “inseparable concepts”, recalling Abdul Khakee’s article, written in 1998. Using these considerations as a starting point, the aim of the thesis is to highlight, in terms of issues, the question of relationship between governance, planning and evaluation . At different levels of government (regional, provincial and local), through the analysis of case studies, the thesis identifies, in an original way, for territorial governance problems and possible solutions. It define, in particular, procedural requirements for a SEA fully integrated in urban and territorial planning process with the creation of a procedural Protocol.