Sustainability and cohesion: local resilience as a key factor

Nicola Vallo, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Paola Muccitelli, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)

This work, moving from the classical definition of sustainable development, try to propose a more updated definition of it that takes into consideration an interpretation of environmental resources as commons goods and relational goods. We define this version of sustainability, more focused on local scale and local network, “advanced sustainability”. The hypothesis of this work is that the strength of local cohesion, on regional or sub-regional scale, could lead to this form of advanced sustainability; the presence of resilience strategies in areas strongly interconnected, thanks to the circulation of relational goods, could be a condition for the development of an advanced sustainability. The research is structured in two parts. The first part is focused on the analysis of the Energy and Environmental Regional Programs of the Italian regions. The analysis aims to verify if local governance programs include the activation of resilience strategies to promote the development of an advanced sustainability. In this part textual analysis techniques are used. The second part presents a rating of all the Italian regions in respect to advanced sustainability, using factor analysis techniques on social, environmental and economic indicators. The final results of the analysis aims to investigate the relation between social cohesion ad advanced sustainability, to underline the relation between the presence and the intensity of local cohesion and the different levels of advanced sustainability.