Tre anni di Patto di Fiume Simeto. Autogoverno o nuova governance locale?

In the last decade, in Italy there has been a growing interest for collabora- tive watershed planning, translated in the application of River Contracts. This has opened some questions in terms of the organizational structures (govern- ance) needed for their implementation. River Contracts, especially those with a strong leadership from the civil society, seem to be a possible path for practical experimentations of the theoretical debate concerned with the innovation of the consolidated models of representative democracy in Western (or Western- ized) societies. But achieving this goal requires new forms of governance for supporting a constructive interaction between social actors and institutions. Yet, the limits of this interaction emerge daily, paired with a collective disorien- tation in the post-political debate. An interpretative key to this crisis can be traced back to the lack of adequate tools aimed at making the institutions more transparent and accountable. Nevertheless, institutions are the pillars for sus- taining solid communities, able co-evolve and adapt to the challenges of contemporaneity, in a constant dialogical tension between different parties and actors. With these premises, the present article reflects on the possibilities of an in- version of direction of the aforementioned crisis, telling the story of the first three years of a River Contract, the Simeto River Agreement, promoted by an active component of the local community, the Participatory Presidium. This experience is the result of a ten-year long action research process conducted in partnership between the Laboratory for Ecological and Environmental Plan- ning of the Territory (LABPEAT, University of Catania) and a coalition of associations of the Simeto Valley (Eastern Sicily). The present article reflects upon some lessons learned during these three years, related with the problems of implementation of the Agreement and its possibilities of readapting based on the needs that emerged during this first phase of experimentation.