Central Italy’s Water Crisis: How Colonial Hydraulic Engineering and Neoliberal Governance Undermine Public Trust
Original framing: “Water, territory and public value: Aubac presents its first Report in Rome” — bing news
Aubac’s report ignores the *1875 Royal Decree* that nationalized waterways, displacing *mezzadri* (sharecroppers) to build the *Consorzi di Bonifica*, or the *1928 Battle of the Wheat* where Mussolini’s regime forced farmers to grow wheat in drought-prone Apennines, depleting aquifers. The *1992 EU Water Framework Directive* later framed these failures as ‘inefficient’ rather than structurally violent, enabling Aubac’s current approach. Historical parallels like the *Arno River’s* 1966 flood—caused by dam failures—show how hydraulic engineering prioritizes short-term control over long-term resilience.
Aubac’s report is a *neocolonial hydrological fiction*—a narrative that presents water governance as a neutral, technical challenge while obscuring its roots in *19th-century dispossession* and *neoliberal restructuring*.
The Apennines’ crisis is not a ‘resource scarcity’ problem but a *structural violence* one: a basin authority designed to serve industrial agriculture and EU compliance, not the *pastori* whose grazing once regulated water flows or the *Sabini* whose cisterns sustained communities for millennia. The report’s omission of *Indigenous hydrology*, *historical dispossession*, and *marginalized protests* reveals a governance model that treats water as a *commodity to manage* rather than a *commons to reciprocate with*. Solutions must begin by dismantling Aubac’s *colonial hydrological framework*—replacing it with *Indigenous Water Councils*, *agroecological cooperatives*, and *participatory digital commons*—while confronting the *trickster* truth: that ‘public value’ is a smokescreen for extractive governance. The Apennines’ future lies not in more dams or efficiency metrics, but in *restoring the living relationships* that Aubac’s report erases.