Industrial Clusters and Environmental Policies: New Tools for Territorial Management

The paper deals with relationship between industrial policies and territorial environmental policies in industrial clusters, and proposes an innovative approach to the decision making. Because of the globalisation processes, the European SMEs operating in industrial clusters are showing difficulties in maintaining their market competitiveness and nourishing their capability to achieve economic performances; this crisis, with the addition of an increased and increasing care to environmental protection , stimulated the need of new territorial planning and managerial tools. Until today, environmental public policies, based whether on a command and control approach or on promotion of participative methods (Local Agenda 21 processes), weren’t really able to assure the adoption of integrated policies to local development by sustainability viewpoint; in fact the former ones were frequently applied only to industrial firms control (with no link to territorial planning), the latter were marked as meta-planning experiences (unable to catch the peculiarities and needs of local productive systems). By relying on the nature of the industrial processes, social relations and tight interactions between stakeholders existing within a so-called “industrial cluster”, the methodological approach detailed in the paper aims at applying tools typical of environmental management to industrial clusters, making them useful to SMEs and local communities requirements. Within these territorial agglomerations of industrial activities, there often are significant environmental problems caused by the high concentration of pollutant production processes. Moreover, due to the large number of similar industrial activities, there is a “cumulative” effect for many environmental aspects (examples are: the amplified impact of the same emission to air produced by many different firms, or the amplified traffic problem induced by the transportation of intermediate goods within the cluster, and so on). These environmental problems are caused by the interactions between firms in the local supply chain: a cooperative approach is needed in order to favour an integrated management of the environmental aspects. In particular, this method encompasses the implementation of the different steps foreseen by the EMAS Regulation at the cluster level, through the following phases: set up of a Promotion Committee, coordinating the environmental management initiatives of the different local actors and driving all the environmental planning actions at the cluster level; carrying out a “Cluster Environmental Review” assessing the most relevant environmental aspects of the cluster definition, by the Promotion Committee, of a Cluster Environmental Policy and drafting of a Cluster Environmental Programme promotion and carrying out of specific initiatives addressed to local actors (SMEs, service providers, Local Authorities, etc.) aimed at pursuing the environmental objectives set in the Programme