2021 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"

The experience carried out aimed at overcoming information asymmetries, misunderstandings, mistrust, conflicts that usually slow down and / or prevent development programs, because they are perceived as "dropped from above" by local institutions and communities or considered "excessively localists” by supra-local decision-making powers. For this reason it can be seen as an important chance of collective learning for local communities and ruling classes at different institutional levels.

The participatory process, in fact, placed itself in the middle, between top down and bottom-up.

Thanks to the tested practices and within established times, we learned that the complexity of a territory can be used as a richness when public choices are made in harmony with the knowledge and cooperation of the communities that inhabit it. This measure appears even more necessary in the age in which we live.

The Covid 19 pandemic and climate change have generated unprecedented and devastating effects on the economy and society. It was understood that the hitherto dominant development model had to be reconverted into more sustainable and compatible forms and relationships between Man and Nature; between communities and their own land.

This awareness has grown in governments, scientific communities, international institutions, but, to change the behaviors and lifestyles that cause damage to the environment and the economy, there is a need for the responsible participation of people and communities.

Mobilize communities towards a more promising / profitable "community of destiny"; developing feelings of cooperation and collaboration in the complex social composition and in the peculiarity of the context: this was the guiding thought of the experience briefly represented here.

For this reason, the local socio-economic partnership of the Litorale Domitio-Flegreo was conceived as a permanent participation body to be entrusted with a role of verification and monitoring, also during the subsequent planning, design and implementation phases of the interventions.

In this way, the Department of the Government of the Territory of the Campania Region intended to apply the strong innovations required to a dimension of intervention closer to the territory and the communities concerned.