Lombardy Calls for Holistic Environmental Governance and Policy Reform
The institutional activity in the environmental sector has significantly developed in our Country, implementing measures to ensure the integrity of natural and cultural resources, adopting a “governance of the environment” approach. However, Nicoli Cristiani stated that this has often been characterized by pronounced and questionable sectoralism, causing public policies to take on coercive traits rather than more shared methods of planning, consultation, and consensus-building.
There is therefore a perceived need for a change of direction, moving from the sector-specific restrictions towards the holistic “governance of the environment,” which currently shows evident limitations and disorganized procedures. The urgency lies in an institutional policy aimed at a comprehensive and systematic reorganization of the matter to ensure holistic management of environmental resources through the consolidation of regulations into unified texts and redefinition of powers.
Situation in Lombardy
In Lombardy itself, the regional councilor admitted that the functions related to planning and economic and temporal programming of public works, land development, and environmental management are assigned to different sectors and services, which are not always coordinated. Furthermore, the functional distinctions between the State, Regions, and Provinces are not yet fully clarified.
The same guiding activities proposed and the disbursement of funds intersect at multiple levels. Therefore, the necessity, reiterated by Nicoli Cristiani, is for an intersectoral approach to environmental issues within a single legislative framework in the traditional sense, along with a different attitude by tools and institutions capable of providing timely, simple, clear, and scientifically reliable responses.
Programmatic Proposals
Looking ahead at this legislature, it seems appropriate to envisage, in programmatic terms: an adequate environmental monitoring information system, a conception of programs as flexible and lightweight articulations of regional legislation primarily composed of principles and objectives, and the identification of programmatic approaches exclusively based on the main levels of regional, provincial, and municipal government.
An analytical framework supported by reliable data prepared by the Agenzia regionale di Protezione Ambientale (ARP A), followed by a management of tools coordinated with institutional levels, social partners, and citizens through agreements and program accords. Finally, an articulated system of parameters, such as qualitative standards in relation to various environmental coefficients.
Future Goals
These are the themes that regional councilor Nicoli Cristiani intends to promote against centralistic constraints and restrictions, aiming to offer elements of environmental modernity to a region that has had to reckon more with a “Roman” ideological restrictions than with the active pursuit of compatibility levels between natural resources and the “Lombard” economic system.