In the throes of unfolding climate disaster, we are at a planetary crossroads of profound industrial transformation. This paper argues that tackling the problem of unsustainable growth is crucial in order to mitigate the worst effects of the ecological crisis, and that proposals for decarbonisation, degrowth, and just transitions should be connected. Decarbonisation has become an urgent priority in the global climate race to reach zero emissions by 2050. However, despite increasing net zero pledges from governments, cities, and corporations, the imperative for perpetual economic growth still remains integral to global capitalism. The degrowth movement challenges the dominant paradigm of economic growth and promotes non-marketized ways of living and working, but it remains outside of mainstream economic policies and has little resonance for deindustrialized and marginalized communities. Decarbonisation faces considerable barriers due to embedded interests in fossil fuel-dependent growth. This paper examines one of the key growth obstacles to transitioning away from fossil fuels: the multiscalar problem of petrochemical lock-in, related to growing global demand for carbon-intensive plastics consumption, the use of petrochemicals in green technologies, and regional and local economic dependencies. It focuses on the emblematic case of the petrochemical town of Grangemouth in Scotland, where there is government pressure to pursue growth-led decarbonisation, and local residents and workers have started to question their dependence on fossil fuels, amidst tremendous gaps between local social and economic deprivation and petrochemical industry profits. Rather than considering the need for just transitions only after the loss of industrial jobs, visions for just petrochemical transformations need to be more proactive, speaking to wider degrowth themes of well-being, community participation, and prosperity without extractive growth.

The idea of pricing nature for saving it has gained major traction with the rise of carbon trading and the economy of ecosystem services. However, this has not corresponded to significant effects on climate change, biodiversity loss and other ecological challenges. Is this because nature has not been marketized enough, or because of a fundamental flaw in its commodification? To answer, the paper elaborates on valuation, the underlying moral economy of work and the relationship between work and energy established during industrialization. The result is a fully plastic compound, at once material and abstract, natural and social, hence amenable to a single metric. Ecosystem services even question the alleged need for capital of a moveable frontier of commodification, everything resulting already a commodity. Yet, radical incompleteness of information and incommensurability of values makes their success self-defeating. Acknowledging this leads to reframing criteria of efficiency, pointing to a new grammar of goals, values and relations among people and with things.

This contribution looks, in the light of recent research and debates on labour and the environmental crisis, at three critical nodes in the articles of this special section: the contested meaning of degrowth, the role of labour, and temporality.

We have known for a long time that the environmental question cannot be postponed, yet the attempts made so far have not succeeded in achieving the reversal of direction so often hoped for. What is it that makes it such a difficult task to follow up on choices and policies capable of halting the race towards an announced disaster? How does this sort of «environmental impasse» arise? The articles by Dimitri D’Andrea, Luigi Pellizzoni and Alice Mah presented in this issue are discussed in the light of the diagnoses and possible ways out they propose. Although the articles have different focuses (the legacies of modernity, ecosystem services, degrowth in petrochemicals), three elements of convergence emerge: an awareness of the need for choices and policies capable of questioning the foundations of the current system of production and consumption (an awareness that opens up the willingness to imagine that another way is possible); the need to bring into play different forces and institutional levels calibrated on bioregions; the emergence of combinations of new subjectivities and actors who, taking seriously the warnings of experts and the evidence of experience, will regain the «mobilizing fear» that drives us to take care of the world for the future.

La riflessione all’origine di questo articolo scaturisce, infatti,
\nda quello che è accaduto nel sistema della magistratura italiana
\ncon il caso Palamara, esploso nel maggio del 2019. L’ex
\npresidente dell’Associazione Nazionale Magistrati (ANM), ed
\nex membro del Consiglio superiore della magistratura (CSM),
\nLuca Palamara, è stato espulso dalla magistratura con l’accusa
\ndi aver interferito nell’esercizio delle attività di organi costituzionali,
\nfavorendo alcuni magistrati nelle progressioni di carriera
\ne pilotando l’assegnazione degli incarichi direttivi. Questa
\nvicenda getta luce sull’esistenza di pratiche di azione, relative
\nal governo della magistratura, al funzionamento del CSM e, in
\nparticolare, al meccanismo delle carriere, che vanno ben oltre
\ni fatti emersi e contestati. Si tratta di pratiche molto distanti
\nda quanto prescritto dalla regolazione formale, ridotta a una
\nsorta di paravento per logiche e prassi alternative e parallele
\ngovernate principalmente dalle correnti interne all’ANM. Tale
\nsistema di regolazione alternativa non solo prescinde dalla complessa
\ne inefficiente architettura formale esistente, ma si fonda
\nsu logiche che si collocano, talvolta, ai limiti della trasparenza
\ne dell’imparzialità: vale a dire, i valori che dovrebbero guidare
\nil funzionamento delle istituzioni politico-democratiche, quali
\nil sistema giudiziario.

In recent decades, local governments in Western democracies have experienced a number of significant changes in the organizational arrangements to deliver public services. The article aims at systematizing the knowledge currently available on the organizational tools to manage local public services, providing a classification of delivery arrangements that goes beyond the public-private and hierarchy-market dichotomies, trying to unpack these categories so as to take into account the most recent mixed, or hybrid, solutions that are becoming widespread. Then, the article proposes an analytical framework anchored to the conceptual categories of instrumentality and legitimacy to understand how, and under what conditions, different types of factors combine in leading local governments to choose one organisational tool for service delivery over the others. That framework is applied to two Italian municipalities (Bergamo and Livorno) in order to understand how local decision-makers combine cost-efficiency considerations with concerns on the appropriateness of policy solutions in two distinct policy areas, i.e., garbage collection and early childhood services, which should supposedly drive towards different management choices

This article presents an empirical research on the financialization processes of manufacturing companies in Italy. We focused on the district of Brescia, one of the strategic industrial areas at national level: by considering the entire population of joint-stock companies operating in the sector (currently about 6,000), we studied the diffusion of finance-oriented management logics between 2010 and 2018. We then measured the degree of penetration of financial shareholders within the companies of the district. Furthermore, we analyzed the intertemporal relationship between ownership structures and financialization processes. To this end, we estimated a series of longitudinal models, which allowed us to investigate the tendency of companies to (i) reduce the number of employees, (ii) increase short-term financial assets and (iii) increase the incidence of financial income with respect to sales. The results show that financial logics are gradually advancing, even in a context in which family ownership and medium-small company dimension have always prevailed. Our study highlights the importance of analyzing not only regulatory and macro-institutional frameworks, but especially the organizational fields, since financialization processes are often triggered by relationships between companies and surrounding actors.