Water Management and Dam Construction in the Italian South

Abstract

While a large body of the literature on environmental policies has focused its attention on the impact of regulations on productivity, less attention has been given to the link between industrial policies and transformations of the landscape and of the life of local communities. In this paper I adopt the theoretical approach that has revived recognition of the active role of nature in the historical process to study how, in a remote area of the Italian South, the environment has been affected by industrial policies that totally changed it. The research, rather than starting with the well-worn comparison between southern backwardness and northern development, analyses the history of southern agricultural economies in relation to the policies for land management and rational use of water. This reaffirms the primacy of nature, our foremost provider of renewable assets and resources, and the importance of endowment with energy resources, among the most valuable of which is water. In Italy, in the first half of the twentieth century, the water resources had a dominant role for the life of the people and for the industrialization, representing the principal industrial source of energy, as the country was devoid of coal and fossil fuels. Its exploitation cemented a block of power between democratic politicians technocrats and reformers, that developed spatial planning projects, pretending to contribute at the development of the backward areas of the country. The case reveals the role of water in the dualism of Italian industrialization, between the Italy of the rivers (North) and the Italy of the torrents (South) and the sharp contrast between the northern national ruling class and the southern bourgesie, aimed to preserve their power, keeping the traditional structures of the great landholding. The work shows how the will to endow the Calabrian territory of large electrical infrastructure in the 1920s responded primarily to the needs of the northern entrepreneurial class to exploit new financial opportunities but had no propulsive effects on the regional economic life. The construction of dams in Calabria created a critical situation, linked not to water shortages but to its exploitation, the consequences of which led to the complete transformation of the environment, its abandon from the local communities who suffered for the loss of their land and customary resources.