There is something substantial that has happened in Italy, but which is unlikely to catch the attention of many. Because it has the “defect” of implementing a development package worth 75 billion, of which 40% in the South, with a spending mandate linked to certain strategic sectors: water resources; infrastructures for hydrogeological risk and environmental protection; waste, transport and sustainable mobility; energy, support for the development and attractiveness of businesses, including for the digital and green transitions. This is a maxi-intervention that can contribute to changing important parts of the country’s systemic infrastructural structure starting from its most backward areas and puts fuel in the engine of businesses.
The publication in the official gazette of the new Cohesion decree establishes that ours is the first country to collect the Commission’s recommendations to the member states and gives the Italian model the merit of having implemented a good European practice that affects one of the two fundamental items of the community budget.
The first concrete result of a political choice from the country system, desired by the Meloni government, has been gathered, which has put together the delegations on the implementation of the extraordinary fund of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Pnrr) and those on European Cohesion and the Fund for Development and National Cohesion and which had the delegated minister Fitto with the ability to coordinate all these resources and to have it recognized as good European practice by including this reform among the 7 which are added to the 59 already agreed within the Pnrr.
This result is achieved after an agreement with almost all of the individual Regions meeting five times, within a cage with targeted resources, rewards and substitutive powers with respect to the previously agreed enabling conditions.
If you scroll through the first 8 articles you can clearly see the sign of a new governance that allows for flexibility on the pre-identified intervention sectors, i.e. in the transition between one and the other, mobilizing, from 2021 to 2027, 43 billion in European funds which allow you to reach 75 with national co-financing.
In order to understand each other, from 2021 to today we are at zero expense. By 31 December 2025 the first two years will be reasonably spent because authorized projects and areas of intervention are already known and the governance put in place provides for a very wide range of monitoring, replacement and even cancellation powers in case of passive resistance in clarifying projects and objectives in advance and, possibly, in the subsequent case of delays in the execution phase.
There is a piece of news of absolute importance for the readers of this newspaper, which deserves to be underlined, and it concerns infrastructural equalisation. With the funds of the new European Cohesion, strategic infrastructure investments will concern the South with a much clearer choice than in the past and according to the authentic founding spirit of this type of intervention. The game whereby people said “34% goes to the South” was eliminated, but then this commitment turned out to be the indication of an abstract percentage.
All things considered, this abstract percentage of expenditure destination is replaced by a non-negotiable dry destination of 40% of the new resources directly to the South. In paragraph 5 of article 11 (Provisions regarding infrastructural equalization for the South) it is written verbatim: the words of «ordinary capital account appropriations at least proportional to the resident population» are replaced by the following «of resources not less than 40% of allocable resources”.
The reversal of approach is determined by the fact that agreements on interventions are made first with the individual Regions. This has already happened with all except Puglia, Sicily, Campania and Sardinia. On the first two we are quite close to the final definition of the agreement, on the other two we are further behind for different reasons. There is a word included in the provision which, in our opinion, must lead all interested parties, ministries and Regions, to reflect on the depth of the change implemented.
This word is called excerpt. It means that anyone who does not first agree on the interventions within the areas predetermined by the European and Italian governments and their executive structures, perhaps because they think they can decide on their own as happened with previous programming, this time will have the resources assigned and the same resources will be allocated at the central office to the same departments and the same Regions on the projects that will be decided to favor. This is not an irrelevant fact.
