We conclude the interview with Sergio Gallo, whom we thank very much for his availability and to whom we renew our congratulations on his degree in Management for International and Government Organisations.
To read the first part of the interview, click here.
- One of the key points of your Thesis concerns the Public Private Partnership. How, according to your study, can the PPP make a difference in revitalising tomorrow’s infrastructure and services?
The point is to inform Administrations about the opportunities that exist, and then support them at a territorial level in understanding, making this approach their own and implementing it together with stakeholders, increasing confidence in the Administration and its ability to collaborate, whether with a private partner or with other stakeholders, to design efficient, effective, impactful policies. The role of the private sector in this sense is to accelerate this process, especially if we are talking about those businesses that work in the knowledge economy, i.e. strategic consulting companies, performance management, etc.; that part of the tertiary sector that offers services to Public Administrations can play a fundamental role in this process of generating shared value, which is then the fulcrum of public-private collaboration.
The objective is to maximise the value we manage to create, a value that is shared, however, and that therefore represents a profit opportunity for the private actor that makes its knowledge, skills, infrastructures and, in this case, methodology (which is perhaps the most important asset that CISA makes available) available to the public, as well as its skills… and that at the same time also allows the Administrations to create more value for the same amount of money.
It is not a question of creating dependencies, but of activating virtuous circles by incubating and accelerating this process of territorial development, and of bequeathing to the territory not only a list of projects (some started and some completed), of new infrastructures or new services, but above all of handing over to the territory a more intangible infrastructure: a new Administration that, during this path, has increased its skills, its interest and its awareness of the opportunities offered by the various frameworks, in this case above all by the European Union.
- Participation is a strong element that emerged in your Thesis, about which there is much discussion today also because there are still few effective models. This is where your professional experience comes in, what do you think are the key elements of effective participation?
In my Thesis I wrote ‘information is a precondition for participation’, i.e. information comes first and then participation takes place. This is not my opinion, in fact it is a concept that has been reiterated many times, including by the recent OECD guidelines for stakeholder engagement, which proposes precisely this criterion, and which is the one that we at REFE will also try to adopt. It is an incremental approach: first of all it starts with information, then it allows the possibility of comparison, then feedback and suggestions, and then it arrives at real participation, what stakeholder engagement really is.
The word engagement is a bit overused sometimes… in fact organising a conference or an event where you simply communicate and tell people is not engagement. By engagement we mean true participatory journeys where, for example, a citizen interested in the I.T.I. can have his say, and his opinion counts because it is not considered mere feedback, but can affect the final decision. The real challenge of this kind of path is to understand which stakeholders should participate and how, because it can be agreed that participation and engagement is open to all, the question is how to guarantee participation that yields results and a real contribution to the development of the territory and, specifically, to the I.T.I. as a project in itself… especially at the same cost.
Clearly, this reasoning mainly concerns citizens as stakeholders, after which, if we speak of participation in the broadest sense, it is in the nature of the I.T.I. to envisage the engagement of so many actors. This is because, if the issue is to ensure continuity of investments and a certain autonomy in long-term management, then it is very important to create an ecosystem of informed and qualified stakeholders to structure concrete collaborations in terms of co-design and co-management of certain activities or specific investments… something that you in CISA already do through the involvement of Universities or Third Sector associations of various kinds.
- As CISA, we have precisely identified the I.T.I. as the tool to help territories because it facilitates the finding and optimisation of resources, especially economic ones. Our activity is based on providing support to local Administrations and, in your Thesis, you brought our Smart Land In Valmalenco project as a case study. As an outsider and scholar, what do you see as the model’s strengths and weaknesses?
The real strength of CISA is that you have taken something that existed on paper, defined somewhat vaguely and applied in so many different and not always efficient ways, and given it a dimension of concreteness that has been translated into a methodology that is evolving. It is definitely an experimental approach and this is a strength: it is not a fixed methodology, but it is dynamic and flexible, evolving as CISA evolves in the different territories over which it slowly begins to expand. You have given body to an idea, you have created a form: the I.T.I. is the idea, the CISA methodology is the actual container. Inside, then, there are many of the inherent pros of the instrument itself: that is, integration from the point of view of resources and thematic priorities, but also the fact of imagining a single strategy that manages to touch on all the salient points of territorial development at the same time and, indeed, exploits precisely the synergies that naturally exist between overlaps.
You have entered a market that was not there, with an instrument that theoretically existed, but which had no concrete dimension.
One limitation we have arrived at, also reasoning with Martina Lombardini, is that scalability does not only apply to the public but also to the private sector: the goal of CISA is, of course, to have a competitive advantage because you have developed the model, but the ultimate goal is not to keep it, but developing a model that can be applied to everyone, on a national scale, which even should not be the responsibility of a private company. This responsibility, now that there is a base, should be assumed by the public and the research community.
As far as critical issues are concerned, I would say that there is a basic issue of trust: attracting private partners is challenging because you are working with Administrations, so it is necessary to make the idea of undertaking an investment of this type more attractive, but this is a general dynamic of anyone who wants to use a slightly more concrete methodology for territorial development… as is the fact that the initial costs fall almost entirely on the private sector.
Another critical aspect of this model, in fact, is that there is a major barrier to entry, namely the initial investments made by the Advisor: the companies that are best able to do this, however, in my opinion, are not the big ones, but rather small, Italian companies, not necessarily coming from the territory (as is the case for CISA), but which at least have the will, time and opportunity to commit and understand, to get to know, to talk to everyone, to go deeper, to create a link with the territory… otherwise the model does not work.
I will conclude by highlighting another aspect that is lacking, but on which I know you are working: the issue of communicating impacts. This is not a limitation of the model, we are simply at an early stage where that component is still missing, and it is essential that it be developed: the work you are doing must be communicated loud and clear, also with the support of the European Union and through the digital infrastructure, with a site that is user-friendly. This becomes fundamental in order to understand and build interest in the I.T.I., also to make higher institutional levels more aware of the work done in the territories.
Therefore, the fundamental theme for an improvement of the model will be to build a narrative of territorial development starting from objective, verifiable information: therefore, starting from the measurement of the impact, with criteria.
