L’esperienza delle public utilities locali: un modello di rapporto impresa-territorio?

After a first conceptual introduction, the paper proposes an analysis of public utilities in Italy from various perspectives, dwelling on the production chain of the main public utilities. Considering the traditional role played by municipal concerns in public utilities, the present work intends to investigate the reasons for the success and the decline of such kind of public intervention. One of the reasons for failure is, meaningfully, the general dissatisfaction perceived by the citizens-customers in the service quality provided by the public operators under a monopoly regime. Nevertheless, even the processes connected to the opening of the market pose some doubts and problems, among these, the need to avoid that high profitable businesses might be privileged to the detriment of others that, however, retain an important social value. Therefore, in order to balance the aspects of local governance with the business synergies deriving from possible aggregations, the paper suggests a model to support decisional processes, in which the specific weight of each variable becomes explicit. Considering the particular nature of the infrastructural networks, the analysis of the relationship between enterprise and territory also marks the possibility to redesign the web of relationships among local agencies, local enterprises of public utilities and territorially embedded financial institutions.