Abstract

Sustainability items have progressively acquired a more complex articulation, through which, beside the environmental dimension, a growing attention and relevance are given to social, economic, institutional and cultural aspects. In this context a particular attention should be given to the territorial dimension of sustainability, since the possibility of development of common initiatives is strongly linked to the involvement of territorial realities with a certain degree of homogeneity, not only from the environmental point of view, but also from the socio-economic one. In this paper this methodological approach has been applied to 41 Communes belonging to the western basin of the Lake of Como, showing how the common naturalistic background can make shared initiatives useful and desirable also in other fields - transports, tourist resources management, landscape protection, services of general interest, labour market - exactly how is recommended by the European Union's Demonstration Programme on Integrated Coastal Zone Management. Cultural dimension and variables should acquire in these kind of process a growing importance, since they constitute a central element in the characterization of the territory and, at the same time, can a play a fundamental role both as economic resource to be exploited and as social elements to guarantee social cohesion at the local scale.