The four kilometers of rock fracture that tore through the Niscemi hill at the end of January brought to light an endless history of administrative paralysis, in which funds against hydrogeological instability, approved since the 1997 landslide, had also become bogged down. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni flew to Sicily three times to personally guarantee that the new funding for the works (75 million euros, accompanied by an equal amount for direct support to the population) would not suffer the same fate as their predecessors, also thanks to the commitment of the Head of Civil Protection Fabio Ciciliano, appointed extraordinary commissioner. And an investigation into the past has been opened by the Gela Public Prosecutor’s Office, which in April registered 13 people, including the last four regional presidents Raffaele Lombardo, Rosario Crocetta, today’s Minister for Civil Protection Nello Musumeci, and the current governor Rosario Crocetta, in the register of suspects for culpable disaster.
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Spending figures
But the small or large Niscemis, in Italy, are thousands. Each with its projects dating back years, and allocations often announced with great fanfare after a calamity and then shipwrecked in the swamps of unfulfilled realizations.
The “Report on the territorial management of the prevention, mitigation, and contrast of hydrogeological instability,” released by the Court of Auditors (resolution 14/2026 of the Autonomies section) is a journey through the broken promises of the fight against landslides and floods. But it is also a treatise on the main disease of Italian administration: the chaos of competencies.
Numbers, as always, are the first key to measuring the extent of the problem. In a convoluted collage between the various official databases on the subject, carried out with “an information integration activity significantly superior to that normally necessary for analyses of a similar nature,” as noted on page 215 of the report, the accounting magistrates examined 5,463 projects, 98.2% of which were started in the years between 2018 and 2022.
These initiatives were allocated a total funding of 3.174 billion: but so far, spending has stopped at 1.31 billion, 41.3%, even though 90% of the initiatives are at least five years old, and for half of these, the years of life are seven or eight.
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Italy at risk
Such a performance does not align well with the urgent nature of these interventions, especially in a country where 93% of municipalities are at risk of flooding (19.3%), landslides (16.2%), or both (56.9%). And nothing ensures that the real picture is not even worse.
Because the magistrates themselves acknowledge that even their titanic efforts were not enough to reconstruct it precisely. Even within the surveyed interventions, the largest group (1,869 works out of 5,463, 34%) is of “undefined” destination, meaning it does not indicate the type of instability it combats. 29.5% of investments are directed against landslide risks, and 27.7% aim to prevent floods. Works against avalanches are only 44, they are the largest financially (1.9 million each, against an overall average of 581 thousand euros per project) and also the slowest to implement, with spending stalled at 27.82%.
Institutional chaos
But the gaps in monitoring are only a symptom of a larger cluster of management flaws. Which, in the words of the Court of Auditors, “do not allow the decision to be translated into infrastructural works.”
With such governance, in short, the timely realization of investments is not difficult. It is impossible. And the increase in allocations, which has indeed occurred, is at best an empty political-administrative exercise. At worst, it is a waste of money.
Public funds end up in an infernal mechanism characterized, as the report always explains, by the “co-presence of no less than seven different administrations involved in the decision-making process, endowed with operational and spending autonomy that effectively makes coordination unfeasible (Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Agriculture, Regions and Regional Presidents in the role of extraordinary commissioners for reconstruction, Basin Authorities, local authorities).”
The “numerous, often mandatory, levels of institutional consultation (the conferences, editor’s note) contribute to lengthening times.”
The exhausting marathon then reaches implementing bodies whose “limited availability of technical skills affects the quality of planning, the feasibility of interventions, and consequently, the ability to use available resources promptly”: in an imbalance between regulatory hypertrophy, institutional tangle, and administrative poverty that in Italy is certainly not limited to the, albeit important, area of hydrogeological instability.
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