Suchergebnisse

The city of Rome displays a marked infrastructural deficit, if compared to other fellow European cities. The difficulty to organise a sound and capillary urban railway network in Rome is evident, and it is generally associated with archaeological and geological issues in the city's underground. The 'Metro C' project – the case study of this research – is the name of the third underground line of Rome, now under construction. The implementation of this important transportation project (nearly 4 billion euros of public money to this day) has been so far slow, over budget, and over time. Urban projects of this sort are outstanding elements for investigating institutional change and continuity in the government of mega-projects. The aim of this chapter is to highlight the defects inherent to the regulative framework applied to the Metro C project – the Legge Obiettivo. This 'exceptional' regulative regime (now abrogated) aimed at strengthening the power of the private contractor (hollowing out that of the client) in public projects' management. Such approach, though, can lead to two different consequences: on the one hand, it might invest the private company with higher pressure for innovative solutions and overall performances, or it can, on the other hand, trigger a domino effect of opportunistic behaviour, if responsibilities are not re-allocated coherently and strategically. Here we provide insight about how it is this second result that has been reached, in the case of the Metro C in Rome.

A strategic infrastructure project in Rome, Italy, and namely the Metro C line, is presented here for scrutinising how institutional frameworks and governance arrangements shape megaproject implementation. On the one side, we look at legal endowments and institutional reforms related to a still incomplete territorial rescaling; on the other side, at routines and practices among actors in project management. More precisely, we develop these two fundamental acceptations of the institutional, reconstructing the management of the project and the path of Italian downscaling reform still underway (that has implications for the governance of projects too). Both these realms have been affected by the advent of the Legge Obiettivo, the special law that for fifteen years has been governing strategic projects in Italy – Metro C included. Via a review of regulatory measures, relevant theoretical constructs in the fields of governance and project studies, and with the help of a number of interviews conducted in 2016 and 2017, we delve into the main reasons that explain the Metro C implementation failure as to cost overrun and delivery delays, and found the primary causes of these latter in the fragmented public client role that cannot guarantee the project's governability.