Levels and Limits of Sustainable Development, from Principles to Legislation: the Water Sector

While sustainable development was officially affirmed twenty years ago, at the Rio de Janeiro Conference (and had already been implicitly present at the Stockholm Conference, twenty years earlier), the quality of national legislation has not significantly improved in the last years. Moreover, the principle itself is constantly stated (both in general environmental legislation and in water sectional legislation), but the specific provisions do not show the substantial change that could have been expected. As for European Union water legislation, the main step forward occurred in year 2000 with the Water Framework Directive (Directive 2000/60/EC) that faced water issues in a basically holistic way (and national legislation followed). Still, the new approach was more influenced by the need of a legislative rationalization than by the sustainable development principle. The paper aims at investigating whether sustainable development has exhausted its effects, and whether the constant reference to it that is made in national and regional policies, strategies and legislation can still have a meaning, or if it should be substantially limited to an international level. The paper will therefore analyze European Union and national (the case study will be Italy) sustainable development policies and strategies, trying to find out what can be the substantial contents to be transferred to specific sectors. The paper will then analyze water legislation (at both levels), trying to find out how sustainable development still affects (or may affect) public choices. The study of the dynamics of multi-level governance and the interaction of such levels will lead to detect the limits and the drawbacks of the sustainable development principle (apart from its general international role). The following step will be to identify its utility in guiding legislative and administrative choices. Its benefits, analyzing the relationship with the use of public discretionary powers, will be pointed out, with special reference to the water sector