SPAZI “CRITICI” E POLITICHE AMBIENTALI. Rappresentazioni incerte in contesti deboli, il caso dell’Autorità di Bacino del Po e della Convenzione delle Alpi

Is there a possibility talking about the environment by telling stories? Starting from the pretext of a planning exercise promoted by the Authority of Po River Basin, for the “maintenance” of mountain and hill territories of the basin; the research inquires the cogency and effectiveness of planning instruments facing to environmental changes, often triggered to solve emergencies, that affecting the socio-ecological regimes. It thus seeks to investigate, how institutions, in particular weak institutions (the IT Basin Authority and the IT Mountain Communities), coping with the unpredictability of accidental events, overwhelming (unknowingly) not only “instrumental” deficits (implementation and misfit), but also operative uncertainty and cultural productions equally unexpected. The problems, related to ecosystems and resources management or climate change, soil conservation, and the cooperative action global-local (and many others), are coming out with prominence on the political agendas as well as on technical one; moreover their approach is often independently, their approach is often, independently, by sector and / or hierarchically, than to socio-ecological regimes, that allow and provide a different “narrative” of the problems and weave unusual web. If the institutional challenge related to environmental policies is facing the cross-cutting approaches, it may not take into account the relevance of no-institutional agents, building networks and sharing knowledge, not only “expert” one. Therefore the shift towards this complexity of relationships, between different kinds of knowledge and different actions, not only institutional or technical, is the subject of inquiring, testing the settlement of an unprecedented political (environment) space. So, methodologically, it is alternating between “analysis” and “narrative” approach. Analysis, focusing on the use of tools to solve the so called environment crisis (MANUMONT Project, promoted by the Authority of Po Basin and the Alpine Convention as an example of Regional Environmental Governance); on the other side, Narration rised the prominence of "stylized facts" (no methods), stories (no big numbers), not merely interpretive, but explanatory emergence of smart players (who have staged unusual outcome for the creation of new spaces). Relating to the modernization and its different epistemological, and investigating them qith misty eyes is perhaps unprecedented fact, to build a new relationship between modernization and the environment. Is there a possibility to solve the relationship between modernization and environmental crisis? This work try to come out a different perspective, raising this relationship in tension and turning the terms of the relationship in: modernization crisis - environment. Three different epistemological modernizations are looking deeply, matching three different approaches to environmental problems: the instrumental one (the PdM of ADB Po), the reflective and self-consciousness one with institutional uncertainties following, and finally the discoursive comes from the overlapping stories and different scales (CA and eco-villages). A tension between speeches, which sees new political subjectivity for the environmental space, getting onto the pragmatic regimes its most convincing valiance. Therefore, challenges, faced by environmental - crisis - modernization, mustn't be address solving the environmental crisis, but considering the crisis, not something to contain or reduce, rather than be questioned.