Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
40
Naples situation. The analysis will then move on to the theoretical issues brought out by the
water problematic; in particular, I shall examine the difficult relationship between citizenship
and the powers-that-be, the private vs public conundrum and the critical issue of the
legitimacy of the Law.
A Historical Outline
Over the past twenty-five years, a process of privatization of the main economic activities has
taken place in Italy. The biggest state-owned companies — ENEL (National Board or
Electric Energy), IRI (Italian Institute for Industrial Reconstruction), ENI (National Board for
Petrol), FS (State Railways), Telecom Italia (Italian Telecommunication Company) and
Highways — have first been transformed from totally public entities into limited companies
and have later been sold on the international financial market. The Italian State has only
retained control of those companies — like ENI, ENEL and the State Railways — which were
considered to be strategic for the country, while others have been liquidated, as in the case of
IRI, or sold to private entrepreneurs, as in the cases of Telecom Italia and Highways.
In other words, the privatization process has involved public services which are
synonymous with citizenship itself — electricity, gas, water, public transport and
telecommunications. From a political perspective, the technical, legal and economic
motivations for privatization were identified with the urgent need to repay a public debt that
was too high in relation to GDP. Another argument in favour of privatization was that public
activities which were highly monopolistic in nature needed to be liberalized especially
because the public bodies that for a long time had managed them were deemed to be
inefficient and excessively expensive.
The reorganization of water management began in the late 1980s, when specific
legislation (law No 183/89) established some general principles for the conservation and
protection of water resources within the general context of soil and environment protection.
Five years later, in 1994, the Galli law
4
addressed the rules on the use and protection of the
water resources establishing, once for all, their public nature.
The Galli law established that
the organization of water services should be based on the size of the natural water
reservoirs and of their actual users, regardless of administrative and bureaucratic
divisions. The underlying logic was that people who live in different municipalities,
provinces or regions may well use water from the same reservoir delivered to them by
the same aqueducts, and the organization of the service must reflect this reality.
Accordingly, this law provided for the establishment of a new administrative body called
‘Ambito Territoriale Ottimale’
(Optimal Territorial Area; from now on, ATO) bringing
together the local authorities in each territorial. Optimization referred to the administration
rather than to the management of the reservoirs. Notably, the Galli law was approved by
Parliament during the most intense phase of privatization of public services. However, the
majority of local public services, including water, continued to be publicly managed.
4
This is Law No 36/94, named after
Galli, the member of Italian Parliament who wrote most of the
text of this law
.
