Siena will host a three day seminar on the 10th, 11th and 12th of July to elaborate alternative proposals from the ones that the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is enforcing through the Provincia. Two years ago the Provincia di Siena, the administration of the city of Siena and the surrounding centres as well as a consistent part of the Chianti region, asked the OECD to study the
district’s development. The OECD reviewed the key sectors of the economy

(tourism and agriculture) and in its report, published in January 2002, expressed satisfaction with the progress of the area. What the OECD demanded was a further insertion of the district within the global world market. The principal concern of the report and of the OECD as an institution, is to increase flows of capital and the domains which are
governed by the laws of the global market.
The report applies to a local context, with exasperated monotony, a simplistic neoliberal model, the unchallenged economic wisdom of the day. Siena, the OECD argues, is successful in the global competition as it provides high-quality services both in the tourism industry and in
the agricultural sector (organic products and costly olive oil and wine). This trend of economic growth should be strengthened with further liberism. The agriturismi (fashionable rural hotels which dot the Senese countryside) should increase their standards and their prices. The
small-scale agricultural enterprises should combine and sell their products on the world market instead of retailing it to local residents.

Public services should conform to the presumed efficiency of the private sector: this means that health and care services should be cut or be partly passed on to voluntary organizations. Technological innovation and the spread of a managerial attitude are seen as key facilitators of
the prescribed development. The post-communist, and now moderate
leftist, administrators of the Provincia were obviously pleased with the outcome of the report. They modelled their Piano Strategico di Sviluppo, the plan which directs the district administration’s policies, on the OECD’s report and invited the OECD to hold a seminar in the city of the
Palio with the title ‘Siena: model of rural development’.
Some of the Senese residents do not share the OECD and the Provincia’s enthusiasm with the current development of the district and with the OECD proposals. Since January alternative policy options are being discussed. Two main critiques are moved to the OECD and Provincia’s documents. First, the neoliberal model which has been practiced over the

last two decades and that the international and local institutions now want to expand, has produced wealth for some but is generating increasing exclusion. Residents have been chased out of entire areas of the district so that these could be sold or rented to incoming Chianti-lovers at prices unaffordable to the local population; transport

services are increasingly thought for tourists rather than residents; shops and services are targeted on high-incomes. The housing problem is worsened by the transformation of rural houses in agriturismi. These countryside hotels are rented in winter to local residents who are chased away in summer at the beginning of the tourist flow. Ordinary
people with normal wages are expelled from the territory; the landscape, after being cleansed, is transformed in an exclusive tourist attraction.

Family-based agricultural production has been chocked by international capital which invests on rewarding high-quality products devastating small-scale production.
The alternative seminar focuses also on what is concealed by the OECD and the Provincia. Over the last decades over hundred citizens’ committees were founded throughout the district to protest against various forms of existing or planned environmental disasters. Not far from the Chianti one finds river Merse, killed by arsenic pouring out of polluting substances of an old mine; an international airport to be
built on one of the principal water sources of the district; a giant power line about to be constructed on medieval sites; toxic incinerators

and dump sites spread over the whole district. Local administrators simply refused to meet, discuss alternatives with the committees that struggle to safeguard their environment. The image of Siena which is broadcasted around the world presents a unique landscape, pollution is denied and hidden.
The seminar to be held next week aims at connecting experiences of protest, share thoughts on sustainable policies of district resource management and formulate plausible alternatives to the existing neoliberal model. The issue is not just one of contents, but of concrete spaces of democratic participation within Western democracies.
Participants seek to control the work of politicians: they demand access

to technical and political documentation, to be heard during
decision-making meetings and the activation of forms of popular and local democracy to invalidate political decision which devastate the environment. The clash is on. The real issue is whether the alternative activists will be able to convince the population of Siena that democracy works better if it is not limited to putting a ballot in a box

once in a while.