Military Training Areas as Semicommons: The Territorial Valorization of Quirra (Sardinia) from Easements to Ecosystem Services

Abstract

The paper addresses the issue of the concurrent use of coastal areas for military training and civil activities, namely tourism. In the paper, starting from the consideration of publicly owned assets as ‘semi-commons’, we propose a method based on the comparison of planning instruments related to the different uses, and try to model them in a grid, where different weights and degrees of evaluation can be considered, in order to promote, rather than blocking, possible activities, compatible with concurrent use. The military areas in Sardinia (region and island, Italy) are around 234 km2, which constitutes 60% of the national surface affected by military easements. This situation is due to its geographic position, considered centrality in the Mediterranean for strategic reasons. This contribution evaluates the performance of the Local Coastline Plan (LCP) and the Site management plan of Community Interest (SCI) in conditions of military constraint. The case study is the municipality of Villaputzu South Sardinia, Italy), where an important coastal military easement and the use of the coast for recreational tourism purposes coexist together through specific planning, a consequence of institutional agreements between the Municipal Administration of Villaputzu and the Ministry of Defense. The idea is considering the concurrent possible land uses guaranteed by the different planning instruments, instead of focusing, as it is generally the rule, on the sum of constraints provided by the laws. The local coastline plan has been identified as the ideal planning tool, which addresses the co-existence of apparently opposite land uses and interests, as those expressed by the local municipal planning and those expressed by the military. An evaluation of the congruence of the specific objectives of the LCP and SCI shows how their combined action favors the environmental enhancement of Sardinia, contributing to the formation of ecosystem services, even in particular conditions arising from military easements. These are sites that evolve from ‘anticommons’ to ‘semicommons’. In fact, the military release process in Sardinia, together with the promiscuous military and civil use, activates unique governance policies of their kind that find a significant field of application in Sardinia to guarantee sustainable renewal of economic development of the ‘semi-commons’ awaiting to become ‘commons’.