Departing from a situated case study, the aim is to put into perspective discourses and practices concerning environmental protection and implementation of innovative economic development models. After fieldwork based in the archipelago of La Maddalena (Sardinia, Italy), I analyze how different actors and institutions come to shape environmental policies at the local level. The complexity characterizing environmental issues demands a multiscalar institutional and bureaucratic dimension (Lemnos and Agrawal, 2006): a number of different actors is implicated in the governance of the environment, coming from plural institutional levels and carrying interests and visions which may be conflicting: from international agencies’ guidelines to local authorities’ decrees, logics and rationalities may shift considerably. At the same time, shifts may often be observed in between the formulation of a specific policy and its application. This work can be associated to the Anthropology of Policy perspective, proposed by C. Shore and S. Wright (1997; 2011), considering «policies as windows onto political processes in which actors, agents, concepts and technologies interact in different sites, creating or consolidating new rationalities of governance and regimes of knowledge and power» (C. Shore et al., 2011). Furthermore, economic activities and trends contribute to orient relations to, and representations of, environmental elements. The very local context, with its configurations, connections, and conflicts, is never a blank sheet on which to translate general protocols and procedures. All those action fields are connected to each other in specific forms of interaction, which A. L. Tsing calls "frictions" (2005). Environmental policies become the observation post to look the State operates at the local scale, giving consideration to the interactions between global requests of neoliberal economic development and particular profits. Coastal areas, especially in the Mediterranean region, are submitted to considerable touristic pressure. Even though many measures intended to limit the impact of tourism and its related activities on the coasts already exist, we may ascertain alarming trends concerning soil consumption, degradation of ecosystem services, and a general difficulty in implementing the role and the effectiveness of environmental policies and institutions. The National Park, as an institution, and the territory of La Maddalena’s archipelago, are placed at the centre of this complexity. As one of the merging points of those multiple factors, it will be taken into account as a political ground of molding of environmental policies and sustainable practices. This presentation will focus on the importance of building a fine knowledge of the dynamics occurring in the daily and locally situated application of those policies, in the attempt of a useful evaluation of real ongoing processes. Anthropological research methods, based on long-lasting permanencies in the field, interviews with a plurality of actors and observations, help in structuring this type of critically constructed knowledge. I will focus specifically on the difficulty of endorsing a paradigm of sustainable development in such a context, paying attention to the contradictions regarding protection and value's exploitation of natural resources, intrinsic in contemporary environmental policies.
Keywords: Anthropology of policies; environmental governance; coastal management; tourism
6b. Urban and rural development
