plan for the integrated protection and management of underground waters as
an item of a general policy of water conservation, above all at a Regional
level.
Nevertheless the most important contribution to the definition of the role of
the Regions (Italian Regional Governments) as strategic stakeholders in the
governance of water services, derives directly from the comprehensive
strategy of development drawn by the cohesion policies that, not by chance,
happen to converge in the broader European Regional Policy as a set of tools
and actions intended to allow for a sustainable and harmonized development
of the European Union. Nonetheless for a better understanding of the context
in question it seems crucial to dwell upon the changes in and the connections
of the policies and dynamics that have brought about a change in the relations
between the stakeholders involved in the process as well as in the needs of the
urban areas.
2 Local Development Policies in a Perspective of Governance: roles and
powers in the field of LPUs
The definition of the local territorial development policies has become in the
last few years, one of the privileged contexts for interpreting governance
models.
Such processes are related to the principle of subsidiarity that re-designs the
relationships across public powers and between public powers and the civil
society:
• the public stakeholders directly involved include regional, provincial and
local governments;
• the economic and social stakeholders include workers, unions, entrepreneurs,
universities and the entire field of education as well as the stakeholders of the
tertiary sector.
In particular, in the field of environmental public utilities, a strong correlation
is observed between merely institutional aspects, political aspects and business
logic. It has not been by chance that the principle of subsidiarity has implied a
greater self-dependence of public administrations both in terms of efficacy
(social, quantitative and qualitative) and of efficiency in a view to