Participation and Representation of the Municipalities in the Organization of Integrated Water Service in Italy. Some Thoughts

Abstract

The right to water is a social right because it requires the State to guarantee the enjoyment of the resource for all. In the last thirty years, the Italian legal system has dealt with harmonizing the regulation of the protection and management of water through a rethinking of public functions and tools for planning of uses and management of water resources. The work, after reconstructing the water as a human right, deals with the regulatory evolution towards water advertising. In the third and fourth sections, it deals with the problems of the organization of integrated water service and its organizational models. In the conclusions, the organizational aspects of the integrated water service are considered central, unjustly neglected, in the most recent debate. The structure of government levels (government) and private participation in water resource choices destined for human consumption (governance) are, in fact, decisive for the implementation of a democratic model in water management that today seems to be for the most recent national and regional regulatory choices formally close and yet far from the local model in a more adequate unitary form.