31 Jan MOBIUS CIRCLE APS – THIRD DEBATE ABOUT CIVIC MONITORING OF THE NATURALISTIC OASIS OF THE RIPARIAN WOOD OF “LACRIMA” CANAL

Posted at 12:06h in ITALY, THIRD DEBATE by

COUNTRY: ITALY

ORGANIZATION: MOBIUS CIRCLE APS

DEBATE’S DATE: 

DEBATE’S PLACE:  CAMPI SALENTINA

LINK TO THE MONITORED PROJECT ON THE NATIONAL OPEN DATA PLATFORM: OPENCOESIONE

 

EVENT’S DESCRIPTION:

The monitoring group, composed of the 3 facilitators of Mobius Circle, Alice, Daniela and Valeriano, 5 students of the 4th grade of the school institute A. Volta of Campi Salentina, and a couple of interested citizens, planned the third project event as a video-interview with the councilor for Public Works of Campi Salentina, Andrea Grasso.
With the continuing state of the pandemic, we preferred to avoid organizing an indoor meeting and decided to conduct a video interview outdoors in front of the city hall.
Although the municipality of Campi Salentina had a long response time to our request to have a conversation about the project of the Naturalistic Oasis of the Lacrima Channel, we managed to establish a contact with the councillor, who gave his availability for the video interview.
The interview was previously prepared together with the monitoring group, which, following the verification and analysis of the open-data available on the project, decided to set the questions to fill in the missing information.
In particular, the critical issues found by the monitoring group during the desk analysis of the official documentation related to the project of the Oasis concerned the low involvement of citizens and local associations by the local administration, which resulted in a lack of knowledge among citizens of the existence of such project and the possibilities of fruition.
In addition, the monitoring group noted the absence of a real management plan to ensure the sustainability of the work over time, care and maintenance, its real usability.
The meeting with Councillor Grasso was preceded by a briefing of the monitoring group to recap the progress of the research on the project and the interview questions.
The interview allowed us to learn more interesting details about the process that led to obtaining the European funding and the mechanisms for allocating the funds, the execution of the work, and finally the aspects related to communication, involvement, and the management plan for the oasis.
The Councillor stated that there is no real management plan for the current state of the oasis, as it was not initially requested in the funding application. However, the management and maintenance, including routine maintenance, is an aspect that should not be overlooked in our opinion to ensure that citizens can really enjoy the services that the oasis can provide to the community.
The Councillor also said that the administration hopes that there are local associations that want to devote themselves to the care and development of the potential use of the oasis.
The full video interview will be published soon.
In any case, through this conversation we have been able to complete the collection of secondary and primary information necessary for the preparation of the final report. We will continue in the next meetings with some inspections at the oasis itself trying to further involve the citizenship in the monitoring process.