WP 106 | 19 The potential of the Trust as the institutional vehicle of choice for empowering the Third Sector in the recovery and enhancement of cultural heritage

In Italy, the protection of cultural heritage has always been delegated mainly to the state or, more generally, to the public sector, especially in light of the natural vocation of public actors to pursue general interests. Nowadays, however, this “bureaucratic automatism” has been challenged by two ongoing macro-trends: on the one hand, the end of the monopoly of public actors in the care of the general interest, due to increasing budgetary constraints; on the other hand, the specular emergence at the municipal level of initiatives of “active citizens” willing to take charge of the protection of general interests and the purpose of recovery and enhancement of the public cultural heritage currently in a state of degradation.
This research aims to bridge the gap in the literature between the perspective of public governance applied to cultural heritage management and the current recorded macro-trends. In concrete terms, the research intends, first of all, to define the interrelationships discernible between the Trust, the collaborative covenant – conceived as a genus of shared forms of administration widespread at the municipal level – and the aforementioned mainstream of public governance. Next, it aims to bring out the potential contribution of the Trust to the management of cultural assets framed as commons. Finally, the research intends to explain in what terms the legal institution of the Trust could be a suitable institutional vehicle for recovering and enhancing degraded cultural properties owned by any municipality by involving community-anchored third sector organizations and, reflexively, intends to enucleate what policy levers can be activated for this purpose with respect to the three forms of community enterprise typified within the Anglo-Saxon literature.