For several months now, there has been a debate, also in Il Sole 24 Ore, about the future of European cohesion policy, in the face of increasingly strong pushes towards its renationalization. Italy has been a forerunner of this process. With the appointment of Raffaele Fitto as Minister for European Affairs, the South, Cohesion Policies, and the PNRR, between 2023 and 2024 a series of reforms were enacted towards greater centralization of this policy, which until now has been mainly managed in Italy by the Regions. The real reform of cohesion (D.L. 60/2024 converted into L. 95/2024) completed a process of gradual shifting of the governance center of the policy in favor of greater national coordination, modeled on the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, of which the cohesion reform was one of the objectives. A key step in the process was the so-called South Decree (D.L. 124/2023 converted into L. 162/2023), which concerned a series of policies for territorial development also supported by national funds. Among these, the special economic zones (Zes), a local development tool aimed at promoting investments by creating targeted incentives in specific geographic areas.
Special Economic Zones
The Zes – eight in total – were introduced in 2017 in some areas of the South with a distinctly bottom-up logic, as they were anchored to local sectoral specialization logics. The Zes, in fact, consisted of port, hinterland port, or logistics platform areas, where companies benefited from tax incentives defined by law, such as investment tax credits, administrative simplifications, plus other benefits that individual Regions could introduce. Following the reform, from 2024, the eight regional Zes merged into a single Zes, an area that includes the entire territory of the South, with the recent addition of the Marche and Umbria regions, and governance was centralized at the Presidency of the Council. Companies can access a tax credit for investments in capital goods (machinery, plants, equipment) and benefit from a simplified authorization process that allows them to start, expand, or convert production facilities with an accelerated procedure.
There is now discussion about expanding the Zes to the entire national territory. It is in continuity with this perspective that the recent bill no. 2925 can be read, marking one of the most significant turning points in Italian port governance in the last thirty years. The bill was presented to the Chamber of Deputies and is currently under discussion in the Chamber’s Transport Committee; the text aims to centralize maritime strategy and relaunch investments by redesigning the decision-making chain, shifting the financial center of gravity, and redefining the relationship between the State, the Port System Authorities, and the territories. At the center of the new framework is Porti d’Italia S.p.A., a new super public company tasked with carrying out strategic infrastructure investments and extraordinary works in ports of national and international interest. The port authorities retain administrative management, local regulation, concessions, services, and ordinary maintenance. The reform does not just strengthen national coordination. It introduces a true centralization of powers and resources. In this perspective, Porti d’Italia can be seen as a unified public concessionaire, comparable to models already tested in railway and road infrastructures with RFI and ANAS: an entity tasked with planning and implementing investments according to a coherent national plan. Consequently, decisions on works that determine the competitive positioning of ports will shift from the port-territorial level to a central control room. Centralization will concern not only competences but also finance. The bill establishes a Fund for strategic maritime transport infrastructures, funded by shares of port revenues, whereby part of the resources generated locally by ports is removed from the direct availability of individual Authorities and channeled into a national fund.
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Reversed Approach
What is emerging is an overall process of reorganization of the governance of significant parts of Italian economic policy, which entails a reversal of the approach: from a logic driven by local traction and territorial autonomy, towards a logic of central strengthening and top-down imposition. The reforms implemented or designed so far are consistent in several aspects: i) a recentralization of power and financial resources from the territory to the center; ii) a reversal from a bottom-up approach to a top-down approach; iii) a constant call for efficiency and coordination to correct presumed excessive fragmentation; iv) a transversal application that includes local development policies, industrial policy, and infrastructure policy.
The Zes-Unification
The resulting governance reorganization can be defined as a process of zes-unification of economic policy: a path of recentralization of power, competences, and financial resources of tools until now conceived for decentralized and cooperative management. The premise, recalled as the matrix of the various interventions, is the need for greater national coordination and the need to overcome excessive fragmentation. However, while the need to operate greater coordination at the central level may be shareable, the problem lies in how such coordination is implemented. Policies based on territories responded to a necessary logic of overcoming a top-down intervention model that did not consider territorial specificities and tended to be excessively homogeneous. The ongoing processes do not seem to outline an evolution towards a new arrangement, but rather a return to a previous logic. It is a model that might better respond to emergencies and increases maneuvering space for governments. But it raises serious questions about the functioning of multilevel governance, at national and European scales.
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