Commensuration and styles of reasoning: Venice, cost–benefit, and the defence of place

Description
This paper discusses some preconditions for ‘‘making things the same’’ by means of quantification
and economic calculation. It examines a controversial cost–benefit analysis, conducted
as part of the environmental appraisal of a large public sector project in Italy: the
long-debated scheme for flood protection in Venice. By tracing the different ‘‘styles of calculation’’
that characterised the economic and environmental appraisal of the project, the
paper analyses the inter-relationship between economic representations of the urban and
natural environment, its political symbolism, and various attempts to intervene upon it. It
follows how the objectivity of numbers is debated, stabilised or disrupted, as differing
appeals to realism and accuracy are advanced in the context of different modes of intervention
and practical aims.

Commensuration and styles of reasoning: Venice, cost–bene?t,
and the defence of place
Rita Samiolo
?
Department of Accounting, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A2AE, United Kingdom
a b s t r a c t
This paper discusses some preconditions for ‘‘making things the same’’ by means of quan-
ti?cation and economic calculation. It examines a controversial cost–bene?t analysis, con-
ducted as part of the environmental appraisal of a large public sector project in Italy: the
long-debated scheme for ?ood protection in Venice. By tracing the different ‘‘styles of cal-
culation’’ that characterised the economic and environmental appraisal of the project, the
paper analyses the inter-relationship between economic representations of the urban and
natural environment, its political symbolism, and various attempts to intervene upon it. It
follows how the objectivity of numbers is debated, stabilised or disrupted, as differing
appeals to realism and accuracy are advanced in the context of different modes of interven-
tion and practical aims. The paper shows that the ‘‘commensuration’’ and ‘‘standardisation’’
that numbers can bring about rest on how the object of calculation as well as, crucially, its
subject are represented and conceived.
Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Very large and visible projects such as the one consid-
ered here – the highly controversial system of mobile bar-
riers for ?ood defence in Venice – give rise to
epistemological wars as well as political ones. Disputes
are inevitably mediated by expert knowledge seeking to
produce ‘‘objective’’ representations in order to ‘‘tame’’
the con?icting subjectivities involved. Numbers, like the
cost–bene?t ratios examined in what follows, are turned
to in attempts to ‘‘standardise’’ decisions (Porter, 1992;
Rose, 1991). The resulting numbers can make decisions ap-
pear to descend from a neutral, impersonal and calculative
logic, rather than fromsubjective judgement. Numbers pro-
vide a sort of ‘‘metacode’’, a ‘‘universal code that appears to
be comprehensible in all frames of reference’’ (Rottenburg,
2009, p. xxix). Once backed up by calculation, decisions are
perceived as replicable and independent of the people tak-
ing them. The subject of the decision is thus ‘‘standardised’’,
made impersonal. And so is its object: numbers represent
reality in a universal format which allows it to circulate
and be further calculated and formatted. Through numbers,
speci?c places are turned into abstract calculable spaces,
which can be compared, ranked, variously organised and
governed ‘‘from a distance’’ (Latour, 1987; Miller, 1992;
Preston, 2006; Robson, 1992; Rose & Miller, 1992).
Yet the extent to which numbers can objectify and stan-
dardise the world, the degree to which calculative tools can
achieve authority, and the more general roles of account-
ing and economic calculation in mediating certain modes
of governance are things that shift over time and across
institutional domains (Burchell, Clubb, & Hopwood, 1985;
Hopwood, 1987, 1992; Miller, 1998; Miller & Napier,
1993; Porter, 1995b). Porter speaks of ‘‘information cul-
tures’’ to indicate that the prevalence of quanti?cation in
government has to be analysed in relation to the speci?c
values and aspirations attached to numbers and quantita-
tive methods, and that these should not be presupposed
as universal or invariant (Porter, 1995a). Along similar
lines, Power observes that forms of economic calculation
can emerge in relation to a variety of ‘‘problems of
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Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402
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objectivity’’ which do not univocally correspond to a given,
monolithic and overbearing market culture or scientistic
culture (Power, 1996).
Despite recognising that accounting’s role in socio-eco-
nomic governance is a contingent and shifting phenome-
non, research has not yet paid systematic attention to this
variability. As recently noted, research in the ?eld of social
and institutional accounting studies has not yet ‘‘come up
with sustained investigations exploring [. . .] interrelations
between theories and models of accounting and ?nance,
the enactment of those relations, and their formation and
reformation, in diverse settings and cultures of calculation’’
(Vollmer, Mennicken, & Preda, 2009, p. 627).
Accounting and economic calculation have been de-
scribed as being at the core of a process of cultural ratio-
nalisation happening at world level (Drori, Meyer, &
Hwang, 2006; Meyer, 1986b; Meyer, Boli, Thomas, &
Ramirez, 1997). Yet, despite the universalistic ambition of
such cultural rationalisation, it is not replicated uniformly
and universally (Cooper, Greenwood, Hinings, & Brown,
1998; Czarniawska & Sevón, 1996; Lounsbury, 2008;
Mennicken, 2008). This is so not only because different
local traditions exist and persist, but also because such
cultural rationalisation is anything but a monolithic and
invariant process. Rather, it is a phenomenon whose gener-
ality, and the very conditions for such generality, need to
be reconstructed by investigating it in its articulation and
internal variety. Even if quanti?cation and economic calcu-
lation tend to be appealed to (or resisted) everywhere in
the name of values such as transparency, democracy,
objectivity, scienti?city, or rationality, the ways in which
such values are interpreted and conveyed through num-
bers are contingent and context-speci?c (Fourcade,
2011). Such contingency and speci?city need to be ad-
dressed if one is to reconstruct the conditions underlying
the rise and spread of accounting and economic calcula-
tion. Exploring variations on the theme of how accounting
and economic calculation become models of governance
and organisation is crucial in order to understand the
sources of their authority and appeal. One can thus ‘‘begin
to explore the different ways in which accounting invents
calculating selves and calculable spaces’’ (Miller, 1992, p.
64), including those situations in which such ‘‘invention’’
is resisted, counteracted and displaced (Espeland, 1998,
p. 37).
This paper seeks to contribute to such agenda. It exam-
ines the con?icting approaches to the costing of ?ood dam-
ages which characterised the cost–bene?t analysis of the
?ood protection scheme for Venice. The case-study pro-
vides the opportunity to analyse different calculative ratio-
nales as they emerge and clash, as well as the conditions
for their emergence. It is a study of variability, in at least
two senses. First, it is a study of howa supposedly standard
calculative approach like cost–bene?t analysis was fol-
lowed in a speci?c territory and within speci?c discursive
conditions which counteracted the commensuration and
objecti?cation which the technique was supposed to bring
about. Second, it is a study of the encounter of different
calculative rationales, of what happens at the crossroads
of multiple ‘‘accountings’’ and calculative approaches
when they are confronted with each other. As such, this
paper re-examines the relationship between economic
calculation and processes of standardisation and
commensuration.
Porter’s work has addressed the relationship between
quanti?cation, objectivity and standardisation (Porter,
1992, 1995b, 1996). Porter links the rise of calculative tools
like cost–bene?t analysis to situations in which profes-
sional expertise is permeable to the questioning of chal-
lenging outsiders, when decisions must be defended by
appealing to neutral and impersonal criteria rather than
to subjective judgement and experience. The objectivity
of numbers is equated with standardisation, a process
whereby decisions are linked to replicable calculative
methodologies which are seen to transcend individual sub-
jectivity and deemed universally applicable (Porter, 1992).
In this sense, numbers can support the aspiration to ‘‘es-
cape from perspective’’ (Daston, 1992) and obtain a univo-
cal, impersonal interpretation of the phenomena around
which decisions come to be framed. They can become
powerful symbols of social order – a precondition, rather
than a consequence, for them standing also as symbols of
truth. Seen as independent of individual perceptions and
idiosyncratic interpretations and as ‘‘the bedrock of sys-
tematic knowledge’’, ‘‘numbers have come to epitomize
the modern fact’’ (Poovey, 1998, p. xii).
Espeland and Stevens use the notion of commensura-
tion to indicate a speci?c form of standardisation, one that
occurs through numbers as distinct from qualitative clas-
ses or categories. Commensuration is seen as the process
whereby different qualities are measured with a single
standard or unit, to derive a common metric through a ser-
ies of aggregations (Espeland, 1998, p. 24, 2000; Espeland
& Stevens, 1998). Through commensuration, ‘‘everyday
experience, practical reasoning, and empathetic identi?ca-
tion become an increasingly irrelevant basis for judgment
as context is stripped away ad relationships become more
abstractly represented by numbers’’ (Espeland, 1998, p.
25). In this way, Espeland notes, new links are forged be-
tween things previously separated, but at the same time
distance is created by the mediation and abstraction im-
posed by numbers (1998, p. 28). New standardised objects
– the aggregates constituted in the act of commensurating
– are formed, and the meaning and value of the individual
elements thus aggregated changes as a result. Commensu-
ration ‘‘changes the locus and form of attention, both cre-
ating and obscuring relations among entities’’ (Espeland
& Sauder, 2007, p. 16). Espeland and Stevens, like Porter,
link commensuration to cultures which oppose ‘‘personal
ties, elites or patriarchal relations’’ (1998, p. 321). Com-
mensuration is seen as a way to reform institutional sys-
tems based on personal relationships and local
knowledge in the name of impersonality and universality.
Commensuration is linked to the pursuit of a ‘‘common
interest’’ (Huault & Rainelli-Weiss, 2011).
Espeland and Stevens (1998) draw attention to some of
the conditions underlying resistance to commensuration
and claims of incommensurability. ’’Incommensurables’’
are seen as likely to emerge at the margin between differ-
ent institutional domains, where values and identities are
in question. The two authors call for a more systematic
investigation of commensuration and its limits across dif-
R. Samiolo / Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402 383
ferent institutional contexts: ‘‘We need to explain variation
in what motivates people to commensurate, the forms they
use to do so, commensuration’s practical and political ef-
fects, and how people resist commensuration’’ (Espeland
& Stevens, 1998, p. 315). Huault and Rainelli-Weiss
(2011) discuss the importance of cognitive differences in
explaining failed attempts to commensurate. Drawing on
the sociology of worth (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006), they
trace the different ‘‘orders of worth’’ underlying attempts
to compromise between different risk metrics in the mar-
ket for weather derivatives.
In the project appraisal analysed here, different ap-
proaches to the costing of ?ood damages emerged, re?ect-
ing different understandings of ‘‘objectivity’’ and varying
degrees of belief in the possibility to ‘‘commensurate’’
and in the validity of the aggregate measures resulting
from commensuration. Different numbers resulted from
different ways of conceiving how the territory should be
represented and inscribed in cost–bene?t calculations.
They offered different ways of understanding and ‘‘render-
ing visible’’ (Miller, 1990) the speci?c territory constituted
by Venice and its lagoon – the object of calculation – and
articulated different possibilities for intervening upon it.
Borrowing from Jasanoff (2005), these different rationales
and modes of representation will be described as: a ‘‘view
from nowhere’’, seeking to establish a universal and imper-
sonal way to calculate costs and bene?ts; a ‘‘view from
somewhere’’, based on local knowledge and experience;
and a ‘‘view from everywhere’’, which tried to compromise
between the latter and the former.
Following the history of science and statistics (Hacking,
2002; Schweber, 2006), the notion of ‘‘style’’ is proposed
here to characterise these different calculative approaches.
Hacking introduced the notion of ‘‘style of scienti?c rea-
soning’’ as part of a historical epistemology that seeks to
investigate the conditions for the emergence of speci?c
ways of knowing. Styles of reasoning are de?ned as the
ways in which the possibility for truth and falsehood,
and thus the contents of a certain body of knowledge, are
constituted. The existence of various styles of reasoning
does not imply, according to Hacking, that what is true un-
der a certain style will necessarily be false under another.
Rather, it simply implies that truth values can be estab-
lished only by virtue of a certain style within which spe-
ci?c possibilities for truth and falsehood are created and
others are excluded, and which thus ‘‘determine what
counts as objectivity’’ (2002, pp. 160–161). Styles of rea-
soning settle the types of investigations through which
certain notions of objectivity can be pursued.
The notion of ‘‘styles of calculation’’ is used here to
highlight that differences in modes of economic calculation
can be analysed in terms of the styles of reasoning under-
lying them. Tracing such styles, attending to the speci?c
notions of objectivity they endorse, and examining the dif-
ferent possibilities they open up for representing a terri-
tory and its economy and for intervening upon them,
helps us to make sense of the encounter and potential
clash of different calculative approaches, such as those at
play in the cost–bene?t analysis studied here.
Hacking’s notion of styles does not transplant unpro-
blematically to a public controversy like the one analysed
here. Making it relevant for this study implies moving
away from a historical epistemology that spans the whole
history of science to address a speci?c controversy over the
local application of a speci?c calculative approach – cost–
bene?t analysis – rather than examining the formation of
altogether different bodies of knowledge and their condi-
tions of emergence. None the less, the notion of style is
considered helpful in at least two respects. First, it enables
us to unpack the terms of the dispute beyond the mere
identi?cation of the con?icting interests at stake, of its
winners and losers. It helps to trace the various rationales
that those interests expressed, and which may have con-
tributed to the formation of those interests in the ?rst
place. Disputes like the one analysed here are at once sci-
enti?c and political, they testify to the impossibility of con-
ceiving science and politics as autonomous domains. The
con?icting calculations at play re?ected both different
ways of reasoning about the territory which encompassed
deep-rooted cultural values, and explicit attempts to fur-
ther or oppose speci?c projects and agendas for action.
The sort of defence of place which sought to oppose the at-
tempt to inscribe the territory in an ultimate cost–bene?t
ratio, this paper argues, was both symbolic and strategic,
driven by beliefs and values as much as by an explicit at-
tempt to counteract certain governmental interventions.
Tracing different styles of reasoning behind con?icting
numbers does not mean that an epistemological explana-
tion of a controversy is favoured at the expense of a polit-
ical-economic one. The notion of style simply enables us to
see power and knowledge as mutually constitutive. It as-
sumes neither that numbers are utterly biased and manip-
ulated by prior interests which would exist independently
of any knowledge of the problems at play, nor that eco-
nomic stakes, political passions and cultural values are un-
able to permeate and shape knowledge production.
Second, Hacking’s notion of styles enables us to move
beyond a rigid dualism between commensuration and
claims to incommensurability, between colonising num-
bers and indigenous resistance to calculation. Public dis-
putes involving contested expert evidence display more
complexity than is conveyed by these alternatives; they
exhibit the emergence of multiple ways of ‘‘making things
the same’’ by means of economic calculation and display
varying degrees of resistance to commensuration. Such
disputes re?ect not so much the encounter between a stan-
dardising and commensurating (western) rationality and a
pristine ‘‘other’’ not yet colonised by calculation, such that
one or the other will prevail; more often, they represent
the very ways in which such rationality is continuously
deconstructed and reconstructed from within (Meyer,
1986a).
The rest of this paper is organised as follows. After a
short description of the research materials used, the paper
provides an overview of the so-called ‘‘safeguard’’ of Ven-
ice and of the ?ood protection scheme for the city. The sec-
ond part of the paper illustrates the appraisal of the
scheme and the con?icting positions taken by its support-
ers – the Ministry for Public Works, its local branch the
Water Magistrate, and the consortium of ?rms in charge
of designing and building the project (the Consorzio Vene-
zia Nuova) – and its opponents – the National Commission
384 R. Samiolo/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402
for Environmental Impact Assessment, the Municipality of
Venice, and several civil society organisations (see Fig. 1).
The third part of the paper traces the different ‘‘styles of
reasoning’’ underlying the arguments and calculations of-
fered by these different actors, and the different under-
standings of the object of calculation (Venice and its
lagoon) they entailed. These different styles were never
reconciled. The ?ood protection scheme for Venice was
ultimately approved but its costs, bene?ts and environ-
mental impacts were never agreed upon. As a decision rule
to ‘‘tame’’ political con?ict, as a way to seek impersonality
and standardise the decision and its subject, cost–bene?t
2 Reports by the working
group of Venice
Municipality
(1997, 1998)
Report by the Group of
Five International
Experts (1998)
F A V O U R A B L E
(with prescriptions)
Report of the National
Commission for
Environmental Impact
Assessment (1998)
U N F A V O U R A B L E
Public consultation
(including: Venice
Municipality, Port
Authority, environmental
groups)
Minister of the
Environment: Decree of
Environmental
Compatibility (1998)
N E G A T I V E
Regional Administrative
Court
(2000)
Opinion officially requested by
the national government on
exceptional grounds
Opinion not formally requested
Steps of the ordinary appraisal
process as required by law
Annulled by:
Followed by:
Report on the “risks from
high waters” by Venice
Municipality
(1996)
Environmental
Impact Study (EIS)
by Water Magistrate
and CVN
(1997)
Reviewed by:
Fig. 1. The appraisal process.
R. Samiolo / Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402 385
analysis was ultimately defeated. The fourth section of the
paper argues that such defeat was less the result of irrec-
oncilable differences in styles of calculation and more the
outcome of a speci?c way of conceptualising the subject
of the decision – the state itself. The concluding section
discusses the implications of the case for our understand-
ing of the role of accounting and economic calculation as
technologies that produce objectivity, commensuration
and standardisation, and of the conditions and limits for
the latter.
Note on methodology and materials
The materials used in this article consist of of?cial doc-
uments collected between 2003 and 2008. These docu-
ments date from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, but a
larger set was analysed in the course of this research pro-
ject. Empirical work was placed at a meta-organisational
level to reconstruct how calculations were represented,
problematised or invoked by a variety of actors at a variety
of sites. Forty-two interviews were conducted within dif-
ferent organisations variously involved in studying or
assessing the ?ood protection scheme for Venice or related
issues, in most cases prior to obtaining access to the cited
documents.
Given that it was conducted several years after the ap-
praisal process examined here took place, this research
was not intended as a direct observation of calculations
‘‘in the making’’, in the speci?c locations and at the speci?c
times in which these were carried out. What is being ana-
lysed here is the discourse over calculation that emerged in
the course of the controversy: how calculations ought to be
and what they set out to achieve, according to the of?cial
reconstructions offered by the organisations involved.
Of?cial documents usually offer quite abstract, ‘‘ration-
alised’’ and functionalist understandings of what calcula-
tion should achieve and tend to disregard its practical
applications. The sources analysed here tend to differ. They
were produced for the national government in the course
of an open controversy and are thus rich in detailed obser-
vations and critical comments on the calculations provided
by others. Far from offering a standard account of eco-
nomic calculation, they help to trace the different types
of investigations pursued through the same project apprai-
sal and the different modes of representation fostered by
the same set of calculations.
The safeguard of Venice
The set of scienti?c debates and public projects denoted
today as the ‘‘safeguard’’ of Venice can be traced back to
November 1966, when an exceptional high tide submerged
the city causing the worst ?ood known in its history. The
disaster helped to realise that the lagoon surrounding Ven-
ice had lost much of its natural resilience to ?oods, due, in-
ter alia, to the industrial developments around the port of
Venice which began in the 1920s (Fletcher & Da Mosto,
2004; Fletcher & Spencer, 2005). The 1966 ?ood was fol-
lowed by intense debates in the national and international
media, within the scienti?c community, supranational
organisations like the UNESCO, civil society organisations
and the national parliament (ANSA, 1996; UNESCO, 1969).
Since 1973, when Venice was declared a matter of
‘‘prior national interest’’ (law no. 171/1973), ?ood protec-
tion and the restoration of the hydro-morphological equi-
librium of the Venice lagoon have been under the
responsibility of the Ministry of Public Works, whereas
the urban and architectural maintenance of the city have
remained largely under the responsibility of the Munici-
pality of Venice. In 1984, a new ‘‘special law’’ for Venice
(no. 798/1984) speci?ed how the interventions under the
responsibility of the national government were to be rea-
lised: through the appointment of a private concessionaire,
which was later identi?ed in the Consorzio Venezia Nuova
(CVN from now on). This is a consortium of large engineer-
ing and construction companies and smaller local cooper-
atives (see ‘‘Appendix’’). This decision proved very
controversial, as CVN was appointed without a public ten-
der and became the sole concessionaire of the Ministry for
Public Works and of its local branch, the Venice Water
Magistrate. To counterbalance the large powers attributed
to the concessionaire, the law tried to ensure its effective
monitoring and oversight by creating within the national
government a special ‘‘Committee for Policy Coordination
and Control’’. This inter-ministerial committee is in charge
of high level political supervision on all matters concerning
Venice and its safeguard, for which it is the ultimate deci-
sion maker (see ‘‘Appendix’’). The monopolistic position of
the CVN has not ceased to stir discontent and ?erce criti-
cism, and has been the object of an appeal to the European
Union (see ‘‘Appendix’’).
Among the interventions which in 1973 were placed
within the remit of the national government was the real-
isation of a ?ood barrier, whose design was developed by
the National Research Council in the course of the 1970s,
and assigned to the CVN after the passing of the aforemen-
tioned law 798/1984. The original project idea was partly
altered and redeveloped by the CVN in the course of the
1980s and 1990s, leading to the present version of the
project: a set of mobile barriers to be placed at the three
lagoon inlets and to be operated in case of exceptional high
tides. The barrier is made of 78 retracting oscillating buoy-
ancy steel gates distributed across the three inlets. Under
normal conditions, gates are ?lled with water and rest on
concrete caissons implanted on the sea bed at the inlets.
To be operated, they are in?ated with compressed air,
which makes them rise and oscillate around their hinge,
so as to temporarily separate the lagoon from the sea.
The project is known as Mo.S.E., the acronym of the barrier
prototype realised in the 1980s, which came to be used to
denote the barrier itself.
The barrier is not the only ?ood protection initiative
established by the special laws for Venice. Other, ‘‘softer’’
measures have been adopted. A ?rst set of measures con-
cerns the morphological restoration of the lagoon to con-
trast erosion and support the natural resilience provided
by salt marshes. Such restoration works are known as ‘‘dif-
fuse measures’’, and are under the responsibility of the na-
tional government (and thus of the Water Magistrate and
CVN). A second set of measures, known as ‘‘local defences’’,
entails the restoration and maintenance of the built
386 R. Samiolo/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402
environment, including the raising of pavements and
embankments and the periodic dredging of canals in the
city. Some local defences (e.g. in the area of Saint Mark)
have been realised by the CVN until the mid-1990s, when,
following law 139/1992, works were assigned to the
Municipality as part of a major set of urban maintenance
and restoration initiatives. Insula Spa, a public limited
company controlled by the Municipality, was founded in
1997 to undertake them (see ‘‘Appendix’’).
These different sets of projects were always conceived
by the law as complementary. However, environmentalists
and other actors, including the Municipality of Venice,
regarded the full restoration of the lagoon as a precondition
for the construction of a ?ood barrier. Furthermore, they
saw the consequences of a partial or temporary closure
of the lagoon inlets on the hydraulic, morphological and
environmental conditions of the lagoon as highly uncer-
tain. Their priority was to restore the natural resilience of
the lagoon and to ‘‘undo’’ the damages caused by decades
of industrialisation. That the exchange of waters between
the lagoon and the sea, which had for centuries remained
more or less ‘‘natural’’, had to be delegated to a complex
arti?cial system was considered problematic. Since 1975,
governmental guidelines had established that any ?ood
barrier would have to be gradual, ?exible and reversible,
so as to experiment in vivo how the lagoon reacted to the
closure of the inlets. These three conditions were strongly
endorsed by the Municipality (Consiglio Comunale di
Venezia, 1979, p. 1/2), and were seen to re?ect the tradi-
tional prudence with respect to hydraulic works for which
the old Republic of Venice is still praised today. The degree
to which the Mo.S.E. project ful?ls such conditions has
been and remains very controversial. First, the concrete
caissons on which each gate rests are not removable. Sec-
ond, the barrier will ?x the size of the lagoon inlets at their
present arti?cial depth and width. As a result, the barrier
will make permanent several changes to the lagoon mor-
phology – such as the size and depth of the channels at
the three inlets – brought in by the needs of navigation
associated with the industrial and commercial develop-
ment of the port of Venice.
In the course of the last 30 years concerns with the bar-
riers’ cost, complexity and potential interferences with the
lagoon’s economy, ecology and morphology have repeat-
edly been voiced by the city council in Venice as well as
by individual experts, environmental and conservation
groups and other civil society organisations. Those matters
of concern have been at the centre of the scienti?c and
political controversy which sparked on the occasion of
the environmental impact assessment and cost–bene?t
analysis of the project, to which we now turn.
The appraisal of the ?ood protection scheme
The cost–bene?t analysis examined here was con-
ducted as part of the environmental impact assessment
(EIA) of the ?ood protection scheme. EIA was introduced
in the European Union in 1985 by Directive No. 337, which
made such assessments compulsory for some speci?c
categories of projects. The Directive was transposed into
Italian law in 1988.
1
However, it was not until 1995 that
the Committee for Policy Coordination and Control agreed
to subject the project to an EIA.
2
Requests for such an ap-
praisal had been advanced by the Municipality of Venice
since the early 1980s, before the issuing of Directive No. 337.
In 1982 the city council had passed a motion inviting
the executive committee [giunta] to (Consiglio Comunale
di Venezia, 1988, p. 2):
[. . .] promote, together with the relevant Ministries, the
conduct of a cost–bene?t analysis relative to the entire
set of interventions in the lagoon, to be completed with
the utmost solicitude, based on the criteria provided by
modern environmental economics, and on the princi-
ples which have inspired the special law [for Venice].
3
In this document, ‘‘modern environmental economics’’
was seen as a tool for coordinating and systematising a
set of complex projects spanning across levels of govern-
ment. It was expected to make visible potential trade-offs
among projects, to set priorities, and to make interventions
comparable so as to organise and rationalise them. It was,
in short, appealed to as a tool for the commensuration and
rationalisation of different projects across different levels
of government.
In 1985 the city council explicitly requested an EIA for
the mobile barriers, to be ‘‘elaborated with special care’’
(Consiglio Comunale di Venezia., 1985, p. 2). In 1988 the
city council raised the problem of ‘‘technical-scienti?c con-
trol’’ over the projects developed by the CVN, including the
mobile barriers. The city council noted that (Consiglio
Comunale di Venezia, 1988, p. 2):
The shift to the executive design phase for the more rel-
evant interventions assigned to the Consorzio Venezia
Nuova makes the choice of a more adequate system of
technical–scienti?c control on the project solutions
[proposed] by the concessionaire no longer deferrable.
At this stage, requests for an environmental and eco-
nomic assessment expressed the preoccupation to gain a
second opinion on the technical solutions developed by
the CVN, and on the mobile barriers in particular. A con-
cern with economic ef?ciency and technical effectiveness
repeatedly emerged (Consiglio Comunale di Venezia.,
1995a, p. 3/10):
The environmental, landscape and functional compati-
bility and suitability of any project aiming at making
arti?cial, by means of complex systems, the manage-
ment of internal water ?ows and the defence from med-
ium-high tides should be carefully veri?ed, and not only
with respect to a cost–bene?t analysis, but also and
above all in terms of ensuring that the intended results
will be achieved.
1
With Decree of the President of the Council of Ministers of 10 August
1988, no. 377 and of 27 December 1988; the latter has been updated by
Decree of the President of the Republic no. 348 of 2 September 1999.
2
The ?ood protection scheme for Venice did not neatly ?t into any of the
project categories mentioned by the Directive and by subsequent national
legislation, and whether an EIA was to be seen as compulsory or not
remained controversial for quite some time.
3
All translations from documents in Italian are the author’s own.
R. Samiolo / Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402 387
By 1995, the environmental and economic appraisal of
the mobile barriers had come to be seen as ‘‘indispensable
. . . to express an opinion and make a decision’’ (Consiglio
Comunale di Venezia, 1995a, p. 8/10, 1995b). The city
council once more recommended to conduct a cost–bene?t
analysis of the project, where costs and bene?ts had to be
‘‘understood broadly, not only in a strictly economic sense’’
(Consiglio Comunale di Venezia, 1995a, p.10/10).
In the same year, the council also clari?ed what was
expected from the environmental appraisal (Consiglio
Comunale di Venezia, 1995a, pp. 8–9/10):
The city council believes that the environmental impact
assessment should be conducted [. . .] by one or more
actors able to provide the greatest guarantees of profes-
sional competence and knowledge of the speci?c situa-
tion of the lagoon, as well as independent judgement.
[. . .]
It thus believes that in order to undertake the EIA the
contribution of those international institutions best
able to guarantee impartial work (UNESCO, scienti?c
bodies of the European Union, scientists of worldwide
standing) should be sought, together with extremely
quali?ed local and national contributions.
In the council’s opinion, the detailed procedures to fol-
low in the EIA, where such procedures should necessar-
ily take into account the great speci?city of the lagoon
environment, should be de?ned by a Scienti?c Commit-
tee comprising experts of great standing, which should
ensure the accurate choice of the parameters on which
the EIA is to be based, the de?nition of the procedures it
should follow [iter procedurale], as well as the control
over its advancement and the evaluation of its results.
The council believes that [. . .] public consultation
should subsequently be sought, in order to involve citi-
zens and local institutions in a decision of such rele-
vance, and to restore transparency and democratic
participation.
The council was referring to a theme which has been
running throughout the entire history of the safeguard of
Venice: the uniqueness and speci?city of this territory. As
will be shown later, such claims of speci?city worked
against the standardisation that the very appraisal invoked
here was going to require. The quote above also reinforces
the sense that the EIA was demanded by the Municipality
in order to open the decision making process to indepen-
dent scrutiny. The strong emphasis placed on impartiality,
independence, competence and transparency suggests that
the appraisal was seen as a way to introduce more ‘‘checks
and balances’’ in the appraisal process. These additional
checks and balances were to include local ‘‘lay’’ partici-
pants and professional experts who were to be, in part at
least, international. International institutions were seen
as guarantors of impartiality.
The local and the international were being jointly mobi-
lised in order to counterbalance the national government
and its experts. Calculative authority for the appraisal of
the project was to be polycentric and multi-level. Such
‘‘polycentrism’’ was of?cially endorsed by the national
government when the EIA procedure was ?nally agreed.
Italian legislation prescribes for EIAs the following
procedure: an environmental impact study (EIS) is pro-
duced by the proponents of the project (in this case the
Ministry for Public Works through the Water Magistrate
and its concessionaire CVN); such study is then subjected
to public consultation and ?nally reviewed by the National
Commission for EIA (part of the Ministry for the Environ-
ment). The Commission provides a ?nal opinion on the
environmental impact of the project, which is followed
by a decree of environmental compatibility issued by the
Minister for the Environment. An exceptional element
was added in the case of Venice, to meet the request ad-
vanced by the Municipality: a panel of ?ve experts of ‘‘pro-
ven international standing’’ was appointed to review the
EIS (see ‘‘Appendix’’). In addition, in 1995 the Committee
for Policy Coordination and Control asked the Municipality
to gather information concerning the ‘‘organisation of the
city’’, which the Municipality had privileged access
to, based on which the ‘‘risks facing Venice’’ could be
assessed. It was believed that such information, issued in
1996, would be useful for the redaction of the EIS. Hence,
the Municipality was given an of?cial opportunity to
provide an input to the EIA of the mobile barriers (see
Fig. 1 above).
While the CVN, the Water Magistrate and the panel of
international experts believed that the project passed the
test of EIA and cost–bene?t analysis, the National Commis-
sion for EIA and the Municipality of Venice expressed a
strongly negative opinion on the barriers, both on environ-
mental and economic grounds. The national government
was thus left with two discordant opinions. Following the
negative opinion of the National Commission for EIA, a
decree of negative environmental impact was issued
by the Minister of the Environment (jointly with the
Minister of Cultural Heritage). However, the decree was
appealed in 1999 by the Regional Government and several
business associations, and in 2000 a sentence of the
Regional Administrative Court [Tribunale Amministrativo
Regionale] invalidated it.
4
This opened the path to the
ultimate, but still ?ercely controversial, approval of the
project in 2001.
The Water Magistrate and the Consorzio Venezia Nuova
The EIS included a cost–bene?t analysis conducted on
three project alternatives: option zero (‘‘do nothing’’), the
mobile barriers as designed by CVN, and a third option
constituted by the combination of local defences and
diffuse measures. These three ‘‘options’’ were not seen
as mutually exclusive; they were all part of the general
plan of interventions for Venice and its lagoon proposed
by the CVN since the mid-eighties. Treating them as
alternatives in the cost–bene?t analysis was a way to
4
The decree was invalidated largely for procedural reasons. The Ministry
for Cultural Heritage had signed the decree against the positive opinion on
the project previously expressed by its technical of?ce. This, according to
the Court, would have been acceptable only if the Minister had explained
and motivated this discrepancy. Secondly, the Court found that the review
of the EIS conducted by the national commission for EIA contradicted the
special legislation for Venice or tried to interpret it in a way which was
unfavourable to the mobile barrier project, whereas the latter, or at least
some form of the latter, had itself been prescribed by the law.
388 R. Samiolo/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402
?nd out whether local defences and diffuse measures,
individually or in combination, would be suf?cient to
gain the desired level of safety for the city at an accept-
able cost, or whether the mobile barriers were indeed
necessary.
The socio-economic effects of the mobile barriers
were addressed in the EIS in relation to three sub-
systems: ?shing and aquaculture, port activities, manu-
facturing activities and services. The aim was to calculate
the net present value of the costs that the project would
allow to avoid in the short and long run, together with
any damages it could cause to local economic activities,
in order to get to a measure of the net bene?ts of the
project. Calculations were based on three main scenarios:
no sea level rise, sea level rise of 10 cm, sea level rise of
20 cm.
5
The main interferences regarded the functionality
of the port of Venice during the construction and opera-
tion of the barriers, which, in all three scenarios, were
deemed to be ‘‘within acceptable limits’’ (Magistrato alle
Acque Venezia & Consorzio Venezia Nuova, 1997, p. 157).
The economic bene?ts of the mobile barriers were calcu-
lated as total avoided costs (long-term and short-term)
less total interferences on port activities, discounted at a
5% rate.
The panel of international experts
The review of the EIS made by the ?ve international ex-
perts generally endorsed the mobile barriers from an engi-
neering and environmental perspective, though making
some strong recommendations for further tests and studies
as well as some changes to the design of the project. A sub-
stantial part of their report was devoted to the cost–bene?t
analysis of the mobile barriers. The report concluded that the
project passed ‘‘the test of cost–bene?t analysis’’ (Bourdeau,
Martin, Mei, Musu, & Vellinga, 1998, p. 38). However, it
observed that only a ‘‘partial’’ cost–bene?t analysis had
been possible, either due to incomplete data (for example
related to damages to port activities) or to the impossibil-
ity to quantify the value of the city’s artistic and historical
heritage. Despite these disclaimers, the ?ve international
experts concluded ‘‘that useful and operational conclusions
can be derived from the analysis of the available quantita-
tive estimates’’ (1998, pp. 35–36). The study concluded
that: ‘‘The procedure used in the EIS to calculate long-term
damage is considered acceptable’’ (1998, p. 43).
6
The pro-
ject was seen to be able to reduce between 85% and 90% of
the costs of repairing ?ood damages.
The cost of local defences and the effectiveness of dif-
fuse measures were one of the most controversial aspects
of the EIS. The net present value of the combination of
the two was found to be negative under all three scenarios.
At the time the report was written the Municipality was
asking to explore the feasibility of raising the pavements
of the lower parts of the city to +110 cm or even, when
possible, +120 cm (so-called ‘‘augmented’’ local defences).
The international experts, while using these new levels in
their analysis, did not engage with the views expressed
by the Municipality on what the cost for such augmented
local defences would be, and tended to accept estimates
provided by the CVN and ‘‘con?rmed by other intervie-
wees’’ (1998, pp. 44–45), assuming that such a project
would affect 40% of the surface of Venice, require ninety
years for completion and cost 4200 billion Lire. In addition,
the augmented local defences were seen to have social and
psychological costs non quanti?able in cost–bene?t terms,
while the mobile barriers were seen to bring intangible so-
cial bene?ts, broadly identi?ed with the high degree of
safety and protection from ?oods.
The nature of Venice and its lagoon as ‘‘an international
public good which must be preserved not only in the inter-
est of Venetians but also of mankind as a whole’’ was espe-
cially underlined by the international experts (Bourdeau
et al., 1998, p. 11). Costs were de?ned at the most abstract
level possible: for mankind as a whole, including future
generations. The intangible and non-monetary bene?ts of
the barriers, like the value of preserving Venice’s heritage
to future generations, of avoiding the social costs of local
defences, and of keeping the city ‘‘dry’’ and safe, were espe-
cially emphasised.
The working group of Venice Municipality
In 1996 a working group appointed by the mayor of
Venice analysed the impact of high waters both on the
physical structure of the city and on its economy. The sta-
ted aim of the study was not to precisely quantify ?ood
damages, but to collect all the qualitative and quantitative
information which the local administration had access to,
in order to ‘‘provide a general framework and basic param-
eters’’ (Comune di Venezia., 1996, p. 30/145) to be later
examined and further developed in the course of the EIA.
While the authors of the EIS and the ?ve international
experts were concerned with the possible underestimation
of ?ood damages, the working group warned against the
risk of overestimating the socio-economic impacts of high
waters. The working group regarded the data employed in
its study as ‘‘reliable’’, but, as its report warned, such data
had been elaborated assuming the more pessimistic sce-
narios. It had been deemed: ‘‘important, ?rst of all, to de-
?ne the maximum value of such impacts’’ (1996, p. 7/
145). The working group saw its calculations as open-
ended: ‘‘information is displayed in such a way to allow
for any further evaluation exercise’’ (p. 7/145). They
claimed to be presenting reliable, if ‘‘raw’’, data.
The results of the estimation exercise were interpreted
in the light of actual, but incomplete, information about
the distribution of the population on ground ?oors. As a
way to test results against some real benchmark, the high
5
These thresholds were subsequently revised in the light of more
updated estimates of sea level rise provided by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, but, according to some, not to a suf?cient extent
(Pirazzoli & Umgiesser, 2003, 2006).
6
Long-term costs were de?ned as costs associated with the accumula-
tion of damages from multiple tidal events, whereas short-term costs were
those due to the impact of a single high water. Damages to the physical
infrastructure of the city due to the recurrence of ?oods overtime belonged
to the ?rst category: erosion of the shoreline, damages to canal walls and
embankments and to buildings facing canals due to the low waters which
follow ?oods, salt aggression to buildings, and damages to the drainage
system. Economic losses due to disruptions to traf?c and business
activities, and damages to goods stored on ground ?oors, belonged to the
second category.
R. Samiolo / Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402 389
tide of October, 5 1992 (+124 cm), whose effects had been
described in the main local newspaper, was taken as a ref-
erence point. The impact of high waters as documented by
the local press was seen as less costly than the estimation
exercise would suggest, because, it was claimed, over time
people working and living in Venice have learnt various
resilience strategies.
7
The importance of considering ‘‘historical experience’’
as opposed to the ‘‘hypothetical results’’ obtained through
modelling was often stated, suggesting that the former was
seen as a preferable, more reliable source of evidence. The
actual damages caused by a severe ?ood in 1986 (+158 cm)
were seen as much smaller than those predicted by the
working group for tides of +140 cm, a reason to take these
predictions ‘‘with extreme caution’’. The working group re-
lied on historical evidence which was more qualitative
than quantitative, assumed to capture ‘‘the real experience
of the city’’ in a way that probabilistic models could not.
After the publication of the EIS in 1997, the Municipal-
ity produced a second report with the opinion of its work-
ing group on the EIS, followed in 1998 by a third report
with its opinion on the report by the ?ve international ex-
perts. Both documents were quite critical. The calculations
contained in the EIS were questioned, on several grounds.
In many cases, the costs avoided with the mobile barriers
were deemed overestimated. Many maintenance costs as-
sumed to be avoidable once the mobile barriers would be
in place were seen by the Municipality as non-differential
to the decision to construct the barriers. This was the case,
for example, of the maintenance and repair of embank-
ments and buildings facing canals due to the effect of
‘‘low waters’’,
8
and of damages to buildings from salt
aggression. Damages were related to causes other than low
waters (e.g. motorboat wake) which would not be removed
by the mobile barriers. According to the Municipality, main-
tenance costs could not be much reduced if the mobile bar-
riers were built, and thus the greatest part of such costs
should not be credited as a bene?t of the mobile barriers.
Damages to buildings due to salt aggression were also seen
as largely non differential. Such damages were seen as inev-
itable, part of the ordinary life of the city. In these debates,
what counted as ‘‘ordinary’’ and unavoidable maintenance
– due to the simple fact that the city is built on water – as
opposed to the ‘‘extraordinary’’ costs due to exceptional high
waters, remained ambiguous.
In other cases, the calculation of ?ood damages in the
EIS was seen to descend from the generalisation of non-
representative samples. This was the case of damages
produced by ‘‘low waters’’ to embankments and buildings
facing canals,
9
or damages caused by ?oods to the drainage
system.
10
For both sets of damages, the extension to the en-
tire city of costs incurred for the maintenance and repair of
individual areas was contested, because such areas were not
considered representative of the whole, either in physical
terms (actual damages suffered) or in economic terms (for
example, repair works in the area of St. Mark costing more
than elsewhere).
The same problem of non-representative sampling was
identi?ed for the calculation of damages to socio-economic
activities. The working group of the Municipality was espe-
cially critical of this part of the EIS, which did not fully use
the information collected in the 1996 study, and especially
the historical distribution of tides in the course of the day
and their permanence at each tidal level. Such statistical
data were deemed fundamental precisely because they were
‘‘historical’’, ‘‘real’’, as opposed to the more abstract and
undifferentiated scenarios made in the EIS (1997, p. 38/43):
By not taking into account the time span in which his-
torically – and hence statistically – tidal events took
place, the EIS proposes a homogeneous scenario to
describe the effects of high waters on commuting times,
which appears both methodologically wrong and with-
out any correspondence with reality, because it para-
doxically considers pedestrian mobility in Venice in
the early morning (when about 50 thousand people
are commuting to their workplace, to which 15 thou-
sand students and pupils and thousands of housewives
should be added, not to mention tourists) equal to
mobility late at night (when people moving in the city
are just about a few hundreds).
11
The calculation of damages from the interruption of
business activities during ?oods was also found faulty,
again because overlooking statistical data on the historical
frequencies of high waters at different times of the day and
their permanence at each tidal level. Furthermore, the
working group rejected the assumption that business
activities are interrupted if taking place at levels other than
ground ?oors, while the EIS had assumed that if ground
?oors were ?ooded by more than 15 cm all activities in a
building, even at upper ?oors, would be interrupted. This
was seen, once more, not to correspond to the real experi-
ence of the city, much more resilient to episodes of high
waters than assumed in the EIS (1997, p. 40/43):
7
These were listed in the report: applying removable barriers to the
front doors of houses, raising of the level at which wires and electric boxes
are placed, storing stocks and valuable materials above +120 cm. In
addition to these private measures, raised wooden walkways for a total
length of 4 km are placed by the Municipality on the main pedestrian
routes in the city.
8
With every ?ood aquifers tend to be permeated by salt water and their
level increases, reaching close to the surface. If the tide withdraws too
rapidly, walls and embankments are subject to a rapid change of pressure
between the still full aquifer and the withdrawing tide. This can result in
instability for the built environment facing canals.
9
The authors of the EIS had estimated damages by monitoring some
embankments in the Pellestrina littoral, and reckoned that in the overall
lagoon about 46 km of embankments were at risk from low waters.
However, the working group did not consider Pellestrina as a representa-
tive sample of the 46 km at risk (Comune di Venezia, 1997).
10
When the EIS was elaborated, sewer ducts had undergone repair works
in two areas (St. Mark’s square and the Tolentini area). The average cost per
metre of repairs incurred in the two areas was chosen to calculate the cost
for similar works throughout the whole city. Like in the case of embank-
ments, the working group contested the sampling methodology used in the
EIS observing that works in the St. Mark area are much more expensive
than anywhere else in Venice. Furthermore, it observed that at +100 cm,
which corresponds to the level at which the city is ?ooded and the barriers
would be operated, while Venice would be dry, underlying sewer ducts
would anyway be at least partially ?ooded and thus damaged.
11
Such observation concerning mobility at night was later taken into
account by the CVN, which revised its estimates accordingly. The revision
did not signi?cantly alter the results of the cost–bene?t analysis.
390 R. Samiolo/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402
This assertion is in stark contrast with the real data of
concrete experience, which in the conditions indicated
in the Study [EIS] is indeed affected by hindrances and
delays, but not the suspension of all business activities
within ?ooded buildings.
The same contrast between the assumptions of the EIS
and the ‘‘real data of concrete experience’’ was found in
the calculations concerning damages to goods stored on
ground ?oors. These, according to the working group, are
normally placed at levels higher than +120 or even
+130 cm and are moved in case a higher than normal tide
is announced.
According to the Municipality, the EIS was based on
abstract assumptions which did not take into account
the reality of the city. This was especially claimed for
the calculation of the cost of local defences, a set of
works which in the meantime had been assigned to the
Municipality and its controlled company Insula (1998,
p. 30/36):
The data reproduced in the report [by the ?ve interna-
tional experts] appear to be entirely overestimated,
and the methodology adopted and today explicitly
declared (cost of the interventions in some of the more
complex and economically expensive ‘‘insulae’’, Saint
Mark, Rialto, Tolentini, multiplied by the extension of
the areas lying below +120 cm) appears once again
rough if compared with the capillary work of real quan-
ti?cation of costs done by Insula SpA and not by Insula
only.
The overall evaluation of the economic effects of high
waters on the city provided by the EIS was thus summa-
rised (1997, p. 40/43):
[. . .] the lack of consideration, in the EIS, of statistical
data on the hourly distribution of high tides during
the day, the use of doubtful basic data, the evident
contrast between the hypotheses formulated in the
Study and concrete experience, heavily undermine
the overall valuation of damages to socio-economic
activities: the latter appears more as the result of
merely theoretical valuation exercises than the real
‘‘picture’’ of how socio-economic activities take place
during tidal events.
The abstract ‘‘economic’’ notion of costs used in the
cost–bene?t analysis tended to clash with the more con-
crete accounting of costs offered by the Municipality. Sam-
pling and averaging of costs across the city were rejected in
the light of the ‘‘differentiated’’ character of the latter.
Models were suspected of reductionism, against evidence
of a more complex reality, as experienced through daily
maintenance activities. The only stable referent from the
perspective of the Municipality was the past: historical fre-
quencies and damages or costs already incurred. The
Municipality was claiming a special, local knowledge of
the differentiated reality of the city, based on direct expe-
rience. It was defending a perspective which could only be
held locally, whose truth claims could only apply to a
circumscribed place made of actual citizens and their resil-
ience strategies.
The National Commission for EIA
The Commission presented its extensive review of the
EIS at the end of 1998. Its 400 pages included a section
speci?cally devoted to the cost–bene?t analysis of the mo-
bile barriers. The Commission was very critical of the EIS
and unconvinced by the project. The cost–bene?t analysis
conducted in the EIS was found faulty and criticised on
many grounds. The Commission lamented the inaccurate
identi?cation and quanti?cation of phenomena and their
causes (Ministero dell’Ambiente, 1998, part II.5, p. 162):
[. . .] the dynamics of high water events, cause-effect
linkages and the damages which can be attributed to
such events are reconstructed through procedures
which entail numerous generalisations [schematizzazi-
oni] and simpli?cations, resulting in approximations
not always identi?ed as such nor controllable, which
stem from unveri?able assumptions and hypotheses
and are prone to incur into logical, computational or
estimation errors of signi?cant magnitude, at times
vital for the reliability of individual estimates.
Such criticism was accompanied by an appeal to the
uniqueness and speci?city of Venice and its lagoon, irreducible
– so the study by the Commission seemed to imply – to stand-
ardised approaches to economic calculation (pp. 162–163):
[. . .] the physical and socio-economic system consti-
tuted by the lagoon is unique in its entirety as well as
in its individual components, and it is very dif?cult to
simplify it or assimilate it to the environmental and
human situations which constitute the object of tradi-
tional cost–bene?t analyses [. . .].
A special lagoon, the argument was, requires a special
calculative effort. A greater scienti?c attention, according
to the Commission, should have been devoted to a deeper
study of such allegedly unique phenomena (p. 163):
[. . .] in order to achieve a suf?cient level of reliability for
the estimates of the costs caused by high waters it
would have been indispensable to undertake a set of
investigations, measurements, laboratory and in situ
tests, signi?cantly deeper and more analytical than
those actually conducted [. . .].
The section reviewing the cost–bene?t analysis was
complemented by a series of critical summaries of the
main costs which according to the governmental Commis-
sion had been overestimated. Such summaries credited
many of the observations made by the Municipality and
were seen to ‘‘support this judgment of scarce signi?cance
of the Cost–Bene?t Analysis precisely from a technical and
valuation perspective’’ (p. 164). The conclusion was that (p.
185):
[. . .] a more detailed reconstruction of phenomena,
more careful interpretations or simply more precise
measurements and tests of the dynamics and phenom-
ena at play would have led and could lead to very differ-
ent and even contrasting results [. . .].
What was being objected was not the technique per se,
but the way in which it had been applied, seen as inade-
R. Samiolo / Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402 391
quate to the unique and differentiated context of Venice
and its lagoon. The Commission sought to provide coun-
ter-evidence to improve the description of the impact of
the mobile barriers on the city’s economy. Such counter-
evidence was often based on the views of the Municipality
and on the more ‘‘direct’’ knowledge of phenomena the lat-
ter was claiming to offer. For instance, in relation to disrup-
tions to pedestrian mobility, greater detail was deemed
necessary to describe the delays and economic losses suf-
fered by pedestrians and commuters. Knowing the reasons
of their movement was considered crucial, as opposed to
using the undifferentiated measure of average net hourly
income to approximate the economic value of time lost,
an approach which had instead been seen by the interna-
tional experts as ‘‘normal in calculations of this type’’ (p.
185). Because many people, notably tourists, did not move
for work-related reasons, damages were deemed overesti-
mated. This demand for more detailed information was
reinforced by appealing to standard and (according to the
Commission) widely acceptable procedures for cost–bene-
?t analysis, as long as they espoused greater differentiation
(p. 185):
As normal practice in cost–bene?t analysis, it would
have been appropriate to reduce the time value for
those who commute for reasons other than work, for
study, for tourism [. . .] to decreasing fractions of that
basic value, which pertains to only some categories of
people who are the minority.
Here too, averages were suspected. The calculation of
average damages was objected, deemed imprecise and
seen not to ‘‘correspond to the reality of the city, at least
for high waters reaching +100 cm and +120 cm’’ (p. 190).
As for damages to businesses, the evaluation method used
in the EIS was considered ‘‘acceptable, even though proba-
bly overestimated’’ (p. 190). Overvaluation was explained
as likely to derive from overlooking the so-called ‘‘passive
defence strategies’’ adopted by businesses located on
ground ?oors (i.e. the cited resilience strategies) or the de-
crease in activity in many buildings during non-business
days and holidays, as well as from the overestimation of
the time lost for resuming work on higher ?oors. Similar
observations followed for damages to goods stored in
shops and warehouses, hinting once more at the non-stan-
dard and differentiated reality of the city.
12
Analogously, the evaluation of damages caused by
?oods to embankments was seen as excessively ‘‘hypothet-
ical, parametric and unrealistic’’ (p. 198). The main point
contested was the use of average measures for the depth
of the lagoon, for water height, and for the energy trans-
mitted to embankments. It was deemed that: ‘‘such ‘aver-
ages’ simplify a lagoon reality which is entirely
diversi?ed’’, and that: ‘‘The situations considered (and
counted up to a measure of 120 km of embankments) are
in fact very diverse in terms of waterfront depths’’. The
Commission additionally noted that: ‘‘Not very signi?cant
appears the notion of average embankments and other
support structures, as their conditions can be quite diversi-
?ed in terms of type, project size, state of conservation’’ (p.
199).
On the issue of damages to buildings from salt water
aggression, estimates made in the EIS received analogous
criticism: ‘‘the simpli?cations proposed by the EIS appear
entirely hypothetical and debatable’’ (p. 203). Even if the
CVN had replied to the observations of Venice Municipality
and con?rmed the assumptions made in the EIS, the Com-
mission emphasised the uncertainty still characterising the
phenomenon. The causes of damages to inner walls (not
facing canals) were seen in need of clari?cation. It was sug-
gested that these may not necessarily be related to ?oods
only. A great part of the restoration works were seen to
be anyway needed and thus unavoidable even in case the
mobile barriers were built.
Finally, the Commission questioned the data used to
calculate the surface of walls at risk of salt aggression. In
line with the views of the Municipality, the Commission
observed that the costs related to salt aggression – counted
in the EIS as bene?ts of the mobile barriers – had been
overestimated at least by an order of magnitude, because
most of the maintenance costs would be incurred even in
the presence of the mobile barriers. The Commission noted
the dif?culty to separate the damages produced by ‘‘ordin-
ary’’ tidal dynamics (which would remain even in the case
the mobile barriers were built) from the effects of ‘‘excep-
tional’’ high waters. The inability to grasp this distinction
was seen to undermine the current science of the lagoon,
no longer able, due to environmental degradation, to dis-
tinguish between normal and abnormal phenomena (p.
163):
[. . .] it is dif?cult to separate the effects of signi?cant
high waters [. . .] from the general effects and damages
which characterise the special lagoon environment
and its ordinary tidal dynamics more particularly (the
effects of ‘‘non-high’’ waters). This is also due to the sig-
ni?cant and rapid mutation of many lagoon characters,
both in qualitative and quantitative terms, generated in
the system by the ecological, morphological and hydro-
dynamic transformations caused by human interven-
tions, particularly intense in the last few decades
(from the 1960s onwards), as opposed to the former
conditions of greater stability and thus of certain and
traditional knowledge of phenomena.
In many respects, the views of the Municipality and
those of the Commission for EIA coincided. However, they
were not identical. The Commission was asking for more
experimental tests and more differentiated assumptions,
to adapt the cost–bene?t analysis to the allegedly unique
and complex nature of the lagoon of Venice. It was seeking
a compromise able to capture local variations and speci?c-
ity via localised tests and observations without rejecting
12
For example, it was noted that for many categories of goods, local
consumption by residents and tourists does not correspond to local storage.
Many residents buy those goods on the mainland, while inventories in the
historic centre of Venice are minimised, and most deliveries to businesses
or even home deliveries to end consumers come directly from the mainland
distribution and logistic system. Furthermore, the seasonality of consump-
tion patterns in Venice was used as a differentiating element: the high
water season (winter months) is the time of the year when tourist
expenditure is at its lowest, coinciding with smaller inventories in many
shops and activities (p. 194).
392 R. Samiolo/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402
the possibility to combine and reconcile them into an over-
all representation of the ‘‘unique whole’’ constituted by the
lagoon.
Styles of reasoning and the commensuration of the
object of calculation
The controversy presented above unfolded as a dis-
agreement over the acceptable level of abstraction for
quantitative representations of the city and the lagoon. In
order to calculate overall ?ood damages, the different traits
of the city, of its population and of the lagoon environment
had to be made commensurable, aggregated and combined
into common measures. At stake was the construction of a
uni?ed and systematic vision of the territory, and thus of a
space of quanti?cation where comparisons and equiva-
lences could be established, in order to arrive at an ulti-
mate cost–bene?t ratio. But things could not be ‘‘made
the same’’. Different quantitative representations emerged,
re?ecting different ways of conceiving the territory and
intervening upon it. In particular, the views summarised
above entailed different ‘‘styles’’ of reasoning about the
causes of ?ood damages, i.e. of the phenomena which cost–
bene?t analysis was set out to capture in economic terms.
These different ways of investigating causes and
assumptions about causation, which led to different ways
of costing and calculating, could be described along the
lines of the following dichotomies: normal vs. exceptional
causes, speci?c vs. general causes, physical vs. historical
causes.
Normal vs. exceptional causes
Both the Municipality and the National Commission for
EIA suggested that many of the costs avoided by the mobile
barriers were in fact non differential, because they were
associated with maintenance and repair activities which
would have to be undertaken even if the mobile barriers
were in place. That is, some causes of damage were seen
as ‘‘normal’’ rather than due to exceptional high waters
(e.g. damages to buildings from salt aggression and low
waters). Whether ?ood damages were regarded as under-
estimated or overestimated depended on a certain idea of
what is the ‘‘normal’’, inevitable level of damages suffered
by a city built on water, and thus what is the normal level
of maintenance for the city’s infrastructure. Analogously,
various resilience strategies were seen by the Municipality
as quite normal for a city built on water. They were re-
garded as ordinary rather than as a disruption whose cost
should be eliminated. Once normalised, resilience strate-
gies could be externalised from the calculation.
Thus, the identi?cation of differential costs in the cost-
ing of ?ood damages ultimately rested on a certain notion
of normality which would determine what difference the
mobile barriers could make for the troubled relationship
between the city and waters. In order to agree on which
costs were differential and thus relevant, ideas about the
normal state of the city would need to be discussed and
a boundary between the normal and the exceptional estab-
lished. Treating resilience strategies as ordinary suggests
the acceptance of Venice as a city which, unlike most other
cities, can never be entirely ‘‘dry’’: it normalizes the less
serious ?oods as inevitable. Yet such idea of normality
was not only and perhaps not so much a technical matter,
but a political and cultural one that remained implicit in
the calculations conducted.
Speci?c vs. general causes
The possibility of generalising costs and statistical mea-
sures across the territory, and thus, to some extent, of stan-
dardising it, was questioned. The calculation of damages to
the built environment through the progressive ‘‘averaging’’
of localised conditions, the notion of ‘‘average embank-
ment’’, and the derivation of the cost of local defences from
the generalisation of individual samples, were seen by the
Municipality and the National Commission for EIA as unac-
ceptable approximations. Further differentiation was in-
voked for the scenarios based on which ?ood damages
were calculated (e.g. seasonality of ?oods, types of com-
muters, or other speci?c characteristics of the city requir-
ing special assumptions to be made in the cost–bene?t
analysis). Sampling, averaging and commensurating were
resisted and a strong concern with the meaning and real-
ism of statistical aggregates was expressed. Both the
Municipality and the National Commission suggested that
averages were not meaningful because they combined di-
verse, speci?c, largely incommensurable phenomena
whose causes, the implication was, should be considered
one by one, at a more disaggregated level.
This sort of criticism of statistical aggregates is all but
new. That things and people can be acted upon and gov-
erned on a large scale by virtue of statistical aggregates is
often taken for granted. However, the history of statistics
shows that this was not always the case. As brilliantly ex-
posed by Desrosières (1998, chapter 3), statistical aggre-
gates, their realism and their meaning, have been the
object of ?erce disputes. In the development of clinical
medicine, for example, whether patients could be ‘‘stand-
ardised’’ via statistics was (and still is) highly controversial.
Different camps formed. Family doctors tended to see indi-
viduals as unique and tended to defend the idea of medi-
cine as an ‘‘art’’ based on subjective experience and
tradition. Preventive, collective medicine and hygiene,
operating on a much larger scale, were instead ready to
embrace the use of statistical data to infer connections be-
tween diseases and their cures. They sought to discover the
‘‘macro causes’’ of such diseases by identifying statistical
regularities in the population, in order to establish preven-
tive mass interventions via standard treatments. Some-
where in the middle was the position of those who,
while accepting the new statistical method, worried about
the loss of speci?city it implied and sought to combine the
use of statistical data with experimentation, in order not to
lose track of the ‘‘speci?c causes’’ of illnesses and to avoid
treating patients ‘‘on the average’’. This last group was con-
cerned with the ‘‘micro causes’’ of diseases, to be identi?ed
at the level of the individual patient.
In such debates, different degrees of belief in statistical
aggregates corresponded to a different scale of the medical
interventions sought, as well as to different ways of con-
ceiving the patient. The larger the scale of the intervention
R. Samiolo / Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402 393
sought, the greater the reliance on aggregate measures and
the tolerance of the loss of individual speci?city. Yet
supporters of the idea of medicine as art found it dif?cult
to accept that patients could be commensurated and trea-
ted ‘‘on average’’. Their notion of medicine entailed a view
of the patient and of the doctor–patient relationship as
unique.
Very similar positions were expressed in the contro-
versy over the costing of ?ood damages in Venice. The
same two factors – the type and scale of the interventions
and different conceptions of Venice and its lagoon (the
‘‘patient’’) – help to make sense of such positions. In the
?rst place, resistance to aggregation and averaging can be
linked to the alternative ways of intervening in the lagoon
which the Municipality and the National Commission were
prioritising, and to the speci?c visibility sought in the con-
text of such interventions – the above mentioned diffuse
measures and local defences. It may be argued that the
capillary works of repair and maintenance of the city the
Municipality is largely in charge of are conducive to
the consideration of ‘‘speci?c causes’’ and ‘‘differentiated
phenomena’’. Such works do not require a uni?ed theory
of what causes ?ood damages, the identi?cation of a
general model of causation. Calculations can remain
contingent on the speci?c part of the city or the lagoon
considered. On the other hand, activities oriented not so
much towards an ad-hoc and localised work of mainte-
nance and repair, but towards larger scale, preventive
measures for ?ood control, demand to hold together and
make commensurable a much wider set of relations. They
require a more abstract outlook on the lagoon and a more
systematic take on the causes of ?ood damages, so as to
inscribe in a unitary model the disparate facts of the lagoon
and make them visible froma centre and amenable to large
scale intervention.
Thus, what was supposed to be a neutral representation
of costs, bene?ts and environmental impacts remained clo-
sely entangled with the administrative interventions
which it was expected to assess. Cost–bene?t analysis
was never external to the projects it had to account for.
The costing of ?ood damages was enmeshed in the type
of interventions sought – costing in different ways meant
seeing and thus intervening in different ways (Hopwood,
1992). In this respect, the controversy highlights how rep-
resenting and intervening are co-developed in a process
fraught with contradictions and laborious adjustments
(Hacking, 1983). It shows how ‘‘modes of representation
embody or articulate available ways of organising and
making sense of the world’’ (Poovey, 1998, p. xv). It illus-
trates how ‘‘the conventions of aggregation, whose various
justi?cations and supports depend on circumstance, ?nd
their meaning within the framework of the practices they
account for’’ (Desrosières, 1998, p. 101).
In the second place, different degrees of reliance on
averages and aggregations also expressed alternative ways
of conceiving Venice and the lagoon environment. The
Municipality focused on today’s citizens and their resil-
ience strategies. It offered a vision from the ground, based
on its own speci?c experience of ?oods. The costing of
?ood damages was based on direct historical knowledge
of the actual city and on the experience of its present
inhabitants. Such knowledge was valued and deemed
‘‘real’’ and objective by virtue of its local and unmediated
character: it was described as ‘‘actual’’, not ‘‘hypothetical’’;
as descending from experience and tradition, not models.
‘‘Real’’ costs, in this account, were equated with historic
costs incurred and recorded locally – the only estimates
seen as objective and reliable. The Municipality was claim-
ing the right to represent a setting regarded as speci?c and
highly differentiated, made of unique traits which could
not be treated as equivalent so as to derive an ultimate
and general description. Its representation of the city re-
mained a set of local descriptions of contingent phenom-
ena, a ‘‘view from somewhere’’ based on direct
observation. Such view was seen as more reliable and ver-
i?able than the more abstract modelling offered by the
CVN and endorsed by the international experts.
The perspective adopted by the group of international
experts was consistent with the stance taken in the EIS.
The identi?cation of intangible or social costs was linked
to a very abstract notion of stakeholder: future genera-
tions, mankind as a whole. The de?nition of Venice as a
common heritage for mankind took the calculation of costs
and bene?ts well beyond the horizon of the city’s local
administration, into an abstract economic space where no-
tions of costs and bene?ts are more disengaged from
everyday practices of data collection and direct experience
of ?oods. ‘‘Objective’’ costs, in this account, were all possi-
ble costs: not only those experienced locally, and not only
historic ones; they were ‘‘general’’ costs, systematically
investigated with respect to all possible stakeholders. The
emphasis of the costing exercise was more on the abstract
relevance to a variety of stakeholders, and less on the reli-
ability of primary data. The international experts and the
CVN were trying to describe the city ‘‘from nowhere’’.
13
They were offering a stance which had the ambition to be
impersonal, independent of the viewer, that could transcend
local perspectives to be universally valid and communicable.
They assumed the ‘‘ethos of the interchangeable and there-
fore featureless observer’’, as Daston puts it, ‘‘unmarked by
nationality, by sensory dullness or acuity, by training or tra-
dition; by quirky apparatus, by colourful writing style, or by
any other idiosyncrasy that might interfere with the com-
munication, comparison and accumulation of results’’
(1992, p. 599).
The National Commission for EIA occupied a middle
ground. While rejecting several generalisations resulting
from averaging and aggregation, it also seemed concerned
with the need to reconcile local differences and provide a
more general description of the lagoon, as long as such a
description could accommodate more variation and contin-
gency. But such a general description was not related to any
underlying general or ‘‘macro’’ cause, to a uni?ed model of
the lagoon; rather, it was seen as the result of a variety of
localised, speci?c, ‘‘micro’’ causes, to be explored one by
one via more spatially diversi?ed and localised empirical
tests before any commensuration between them was
13
The expression, borrowed from Nagel (1986), has come to epitomise
the universalistic ambition of modern science and its ideals of objectivity,
impersonality and truth: of a knowledge independent of the knower (see
also: Shapin, 1998).
394 R. Samiolo/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402
attempted. The Commission seemed to imply a view of the
lagoon as a complex and differentiated system shaped by
multiple local causes, a ‘‘unique whole’’ which science was
asked to analyse through more diversi?ed experiments.
The possibility to achieve a ‘‘uni?ed’’ view of these dis-
persed phenomena was problematised in the light of their
uniqueness and internal differentiation, but not entirely
rejected. That is, the Commission seemed to defend a
‘‘view from everywhere’’, in the sense of validating more
general representations of the city and the lagoon only
by means of the speci?c and sometimes anecdotal knowl-
edge held locally. Scienti?c rigour seemed to be related
both to the achievement of general results, and to the need
to derive those results from the consideration of more local
and differentiated sources of evidence which needed to be
analysed in their idiosyncrasy before any commensuration
and generalisation were attempted. The Commission did
not take commensuration for granted, nor rejected it alto-
gether. Rather, it subjected it to the test of local observa-
tions and experiments. The lagoon was deemed as
irreducible to the sum of its parts, even when such sum
was in principle sought.
Both the Municipality and the National Commission
for EIA were appealing to a well-established notion
of the lagoon, traditionally described as unique and
incomparable by the same city council which requested
the involvement of ‘‘modern environmental economics’’
in its safeguard (Consiglio Comunale di Venezia, 1985,
p. 1/4):
[. . .] it is necessary to set a monitoring system for the
continuous veri?cation of the environmental, hygienic,
ecological and hydraulic situation of the lagoon, while
considering the lagoon as the only valid model (of itself),
on which the evolution of the situation and the conse-
quences of the above mentioned interventions should
be experimentally veri?ed. [Emphasis added]
The continuous monitoring of the lagoon of Venice,
the direct experiments with its restoration the
Municipality was invoking, the qualitative observation
of damages caused by ?ood episodes, the estimation of
the costs of local measures from the actual record of
costs already incurred, may be regarded as the expres-
sion of a speci?c style of investigating the ‘‘true facts’’
of the lagoon: direct observation and (quantitative or
qualitative) descriptions of a variety which it was not
necessary to unify. In this account, the object of monitor-
ing and experimentation was treated as internally
incommensurable, unpredictable and largely opaque. It
could be observed and acted upon locally, ‘‘from some-
where’’, but not uni?ed through aggregate measures,
not seen from a centre and thus not ‘‘actionable at a
distance’’. What is more, ‘‘continuous monitoring’’ would
keep the observed phenomena open ended and implicitly
accept their on-going evolution – an evolution which
de?es commensuration. According to this view, the
actual response of the lagoon to its morphological resto-
ration, once the causes of its degradation are removed,
should be observed before designing a ?ood barrier and
assessing its costs and bene?ts.
Natural vs. historical causes
The ‘‘facts’’ of the lagoon were seen as especially
elusive: a ‘‘benchmark’’ state for the latter could not be
established. Opponents of the mobile barriers assumed
that any interventions at the inlets should follow, not pre-
cede, the restoration of the lagoon, which should be taken
back as far as possible to its pre-industrial conditions. The
mobile barriers or analogous solutions would have to be
assessed against the background of a restored and de-pol-
luted lagoon, which, although to an uncertain extent,
would be able to better resist rising tides.
It has been acknowledged that a ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘pristine’’
state is impossible to identify for the lagoon of Venice,
which has been intensely altered by human interventions,
before and after its industrialisation. The future evolution
of the lagoon and the effects of past human interventions
are seen as extremely dif?cult to distinguish when apply-
ing hydrodynamic models (Da Mosto, Spencer, Fletcher, &
Campostrini, 2005, p. 643). Such separation was however
suggested by the Municipality and the National Commis-
sion for EIA, to disengage the future of the lagoon from
its present degraded condition and to show the latter not
as a ‘‘fact’’ based on which ?ood protection measures could
be modelled, but as the inheritance of a past which was
being repudiated. Once linked back to wrong past inter-
ventions, once given a history, the current morphology of
the lagoon was no longer a pure matter of fact which could
be modelled and measured. It came to be seen as one of the
damages caused by industrialisation, which safeguarding
interventions were expected to reverse. It was a ‘‘relative’’,
unstable fact: the consequence of human decisions. That is,
‘‘natural’’ causes and ‘‘historical’’ causes could not be dis-
entangled. The lagoon was portrayed as a complex, ‘‘hy-
brid’’ environment, on which the scars of history were
visible to the eye of ‘‘lay’’ citizens but which remained
reluctant modelling. Conceived as a living, on-going exper-
iment, the lagoon could not be turned into a uni?ed object
of calculation: it remained an incomplete and unstable
‘‘inscription’’ (Latour, 1987), made of parts which could
be continuously observed and recorded but never entirely
inscribed in a theoretical model of the whole.
It is not wilderness, but a nature trans?gured by an
idealised civic tradition which informs the present ideal
of sustainability in Venice (Bevilacqua, 1998; Caniato,
2005). The pre-modern ‘‘hybrid’’ constituted by Venetian
institutions and their hydraulic science and water policies
is still a powerful myth. Studies of the traditional practices
of water management adopted by the Republic of Venice
tend to reinforce the idea of the lagoon as a continuous
and prudent experiment – hence the aforementioned
requirements of gradual, ?exible and reversible ?ood pro-
tection measures. Such studies recall how water policies
were developed by the so-called ‘‘savi alle acque’’ (water
experts) based on the direct local observations provided
by ‘‘lay’’ citizens such as ?shermen (Bevilacqua, 1998;
Zucchetta, 2000). What is today described as the prudent
experimental attitude of the past, based on direct local obser-
vation, is often evoked by opponents of the mobile barrier
project and contrasted with the drastic changes imposed
on the lagoon by its nationally funded industrialisation.
R. Samiolo / Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402 395
The lagoon of the past appears to many as a more stable
reference point than any present, a-historical, ‘‘hard’’ facts,
which in such an altered environment end up being
constantly confused with modernist mistakes and lose
their ‘‘purity’’. The problem of saving Venice continuously
shifted from the realm of science to that of a hybrid and
perhaps mythical science-policy, to the enlightened polis
which lives at once in the memory of the Republic of
Venice and in the promise of a more sustainable future.
Comparing the mobile barriers with diffuse interven-
tions for environmental restoration, making the two alter-
natives commensurable by means of cost–bene?t
calculations, ultimately implied the need to choose be-
tween today’s lagoon, for which the mobile barriers were
being designed, and yesterday’s lagoon, an ideal which
some consider lost for ever, but which many refuse to let
go. Declaring the lagoon as incommensurable, as ‘‘the only
model of itself’’ implied the refusal to treat its present con-
dition as the benchmark which the mobile barriers should
be based on; it was the defence of a highly symbolic place
(a speci?c ‘‘somewhere’’, with its history and human
responsibilities), against the creation of an abstract space
of calculation where past human responsibilities would
be disguised as natural facts.
Styles of calculation
Struggles about how to measure and account for ?ood
damages were also con?icts over how to avoid those dam-
ages via different types of interventions. Representation
and intervention were inextricably linked. However, they
were not recognised and debated as such. The ?ction of
their separation was largely maintained. The assumptions
of calculation were never openly negotiated; they were,
at best, identi?ed at times, but only to be ?ngered as wrong
or implicitly accused of bias. Different arguments may
have been used strategically, as ‘‘ammunition machines’’
(Burchell, Clubb, Hopwood, Hughes, & Nahapiet, 1980) to
promote one solution at the expense of another and one
set of interests at the expense of another. But different ac-
tors were convinced to be right. They mobilised and ex-
pressed different ways of making sense of the causes of
?oods and their costs, as well as different ways of seeing
and knowing Venice and its lagoon.
The different views which emerged in the course of the
controversy can be shown to contain at least ‘‘traces’’ of
different styles of reasoning. As mentioned above, through
the notion of ‘‘style’’ Hacking intends to question the con-
ditions for the emergence of different ways of knowing and
for the establishment of certain bodies of knowledge.
Styles of reasoning are de?ned as that which determines
the types of propositions that become candidates for being
true or false and come to de?ne certain ?elds of inquiry;
they explain why we reason as we do. Styles are different
from methods: they are not the criteria through which
truth values are assigned, but through which certain truth
values, certain ‘‘positivities’’, become possible at all. And
neither do styles coincide with ‘‘logics’’: the latter are ways
of maintaining the truth, whereas the former are ‘‘what
brings in the possibility of truth and falsehood’’ (2002, p.
167). Thus, while a style may encompass certain methods
and logics, it is seen by Hacking as something larger, as
that which makes it possible for certain logics and methods
to emerge in the ?rst place. Furthermore, speci?c methods,
logics and truth values are seen as self-stabilising mecha-
nisms within the style they belong to: a style of reasoning
is akin to a discourse that has developed its own tech-
niques of self-authentication.
The criteria offered by Hacking for the identi?cation of
styles of reasoning have been seen as rather dif?cult to ap-
ply (Kusch, 2010). Following Hacking, a style would have
to be identi?ed via the speci?c ‘‘objects, evidence, sen-
tences [. . .] laws, or, at any rate modalities, possibilities’’
(Hacking, 2002, p. 189) it generates. Examples of styles
provided by Hacking (2002, p. 161, 181) based on the work
of historian Alistair C. Crombie include: postulation in
mathematics, experimental exploration, hypothetical con-
struction of analogical models, comparison and taxonomy,
statistical analysis and calculus of probabilities. To Crom-
bie’s list Hacking adds the so-called ‘‘laboratory style’’ seen
as the fusion of the experimental style and the modelling
style (pp. 182–183).
The con?icting views which emerged in the Venice case
tended to endorse different styles in Crombie’s list: model-
ling in the case of the ‘‘view from nowhere’’ taken by the
CVN and international experts as opposed to direct exper-
imentation on the lagoon, seen as ‘‘the only model of itself’’,
in the case of the Municipality and its ‘‘view from some-
where’’. Direct experimentation was also partly endorsed
by the National Commission for EIA, whose ‘‘viewfromevery-
where’’ required local experiments and tests before any
uni?ed model of the lagoon could be attempted or validated.
Furthermore, numbers and statistics were mobilised
within different forms of representation which, as shown
above, embraced different notions of causationlinked to dif-
ferent ways of conceiving and intervening upon Venice and
its lagoon. Like Hacking’s styles, different views introduced
different modalities and possibilities for intervention at the
expense of others. The ‘‘view from somewhere’’, consisting
of local observations, past experience andinvivo experimen-
tation, was consistent with projects like diffuse measures
and local defences, but was hardly able to provide the more
systematic and uni?ed outlook on the lagoon required by
the ?ood barrier. Conversely, the ‘‘view from nowhere’’
appeared inaccurate and abstract to those interested in local
and capillary maintenance and restoration works.
These views also implied different understandings of
realism and objectivity and mobilised different epistemic
values. Strategic as it may have been, the dispute over
?ood damages and their under- or over-estimation none-
theless went to the heart of the de?nition of objectivity.
The preoccupation with the realism of aggregates and
averages expressed by the Municipality and by the Na-
tional Commission for EIA tended to endorse a notion of
objectivity as data accuracy, as correspondence between
numbers and the underlying physical and economic real-
ity. As a result, the ‘‘view from somewhere’’ and the ‘‘view
from everywhere’’ valued historical frequencies, historic
costs and raw local data, whilst distrusting probabilistic
models, costs to future generations and sampling. Notions
like ‘‘average embankment’’ were rejected as meaningless
in the context of the internally differentiated and unique
396 R. Samiolo/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402
environment represented by Venice and its lagoon, treated
as only partly commensurable. The ‘‘view from nowhere’’
was instead trying to establish a systematic outlook on
?ood damages, a general and coherent description of their
causes and the consideration of all possible stakeholders. It
valued systematicity over accuracy. These two extremes
express different degrees of acceptance of distance and
abstraction in the economic representation of the territory.
The ‘‘view from somewhere’’ and the ‘‘view from every-
where’’ required a tight ?t between recording and observa-
tion, and thus credited primary data. They explicitly
offered a view of the lagoon as an unmediated object of
investigation, as an in vivo experiment. In doing so, they
also implicitly credited the eye of the local observer, whose
virtue lay precisely in the unmediated character of its vi-
sion. In contrast, the ‘‘view from nowhere’’ relied, like most
contemporary economics (Morgan, 2011), on the media-
tion offered by records often produced or interpreted at a
distance from observation, such as statistical aggregates.
Its aim was not so much to provide an accurate description
of the parts, but a theory of the whole.
14
Thus, it was more
tolerant of the loss of accuracy implied by the need to make
dispersed local data ?t a theory of the whole via averages
and aggregations. The eye of the observer was legitimate
in that its vision was systematic, complete and perceived
as independent of the standpoint taken.
Different attitudes towards the realism of aggregates
and averages re?ect what Schweber (2006), borrowing
from Hacking, calls different styles of statistical reasoning.
With the notion of style Schweber denotes the different
types of explanation which statistics has historically pur-
sued in different national contexts. She shows that French
population statistics in the nineteenth century developed a
constant preoccupation with homogeneity and aggrega-
tion. According to Schweber, such preoccupation resulted
from a view of state and society as con?icting and separate
spheres, and expressed a constant concern with the condi-
tions under which unity could be achieved. In this context,
statistical aggregates and the natural and social regulari-
ties that they could in principle reveal were symbolic of
the unity of the state. They were in question because the
latter also was. Statistics was involved in the process of
‘‘adunation’’ of a political entity that needed unifying
(Desrosières, 1998).
15
Along similar lines, it may be argued
that in the case of Venice aggregates were contested because
they established a view from a centre that was also con-
tested, conceived as separate from the territory that cost–
bene?t analysis was seeking to capture in economic terms.
The standardisation of the object of calculation – Venice
and its lagoon – via aggregates, averages and common mea-
sures remained problematic because the subject of the cal-
culation – the state – was perceived as divided and
con?ict-ridden and, as the next section illustrates, it was a
speci?c approach to its ‘‘uni?cation’’ that was at play in
the appraisal process.
Standardising the subject of calculation
The mobile barrier project is currently under construc-
tion and deemed to be 65% complete. Works are expected
to be completed by 2014.
16
The barrier remains, however,
highly controversial. Due to subsequent alterations and inte-
grations to the original project, its costs have risen from just
under 4 billion Euro (as estimated in 2001) to 5.5 billion
Euro. The Municipality of Venice and environmental groups
continue to ?ercely oppose it. In 2005 the Municipality in-
vited proposals for alternative ?ood gate solutions. Nine
submissions were examined, ranked and compared with
the mobile barriers (Comune di Venezia., 2006). The mobile
barriers were ranked fourth out of the ?ve short-listed pro-
jects, which, however, were never considered by the na-
tional government. Furthermore, in 2009 a study
commissioned by the Municipality in order to address con-
cerns with the hydrodynamic behaviour of the mobile bar-
rier system suggested the possible instability of the ?ood
gates under certain conditions (Berhault & Damblans,
2009). More generally, a wealth of materials and studies
have appeared in the last decade, questioning, inter alia,
the adequacy of the project to future sea level rise and its
impacts on the lagoon environment (D’Alpaos, 2010; Pirazz-
oli & Umgiesser, 2003, 2006).
In the midst of this endless controversy, the question
of whether the bene?ts of mobile barriers were greater
than their costs, whether the project was economically
and environmentally rational and useful, did not receive
a ?nal, agreed answer, despite recent academic attempts
to contribute to the debate (Breil, Gambarelli, & Nunes,
2005; Fontini, Umgiesser, & Vergano, 2008; Vergano,
Umgiesser, & Nunes, 2010). Alternative economic repre-
sentations have not been reconciled in the pursuit of an
ultimate conclusion that could be regarded as ‘‘objective’’.
Rather than achieving standardisation and being
presented as impersonal, calculations con?rmed political
divisions. The result of cost–bene?t analysis remained
less important than the differences it elicited and helped
to articulate.
Were the differences in the styles of calculation at play
too radical to be reconciled? The lack of any attempts to
discuss and reconcile them shows that the appetite for
standardisation and the very conditions for the pursuit
of ‘‘mechanical objectivity’’ and the emergence of ‘‘trust
14
This tension between accuracy and systematicity, between raw but
dispersed local data – valued precisely because deemed ‘‘pure’’ and value-
free – and systematised data – elaborated within a certain theory in order
to acquire explanatory power – according to Poovey (1998), is an
unresolved tension in the history of the modern fact and remains the
source of most contemporary disputes over objectivity and the relationship
between facts and values.
15
Conversely, in England atomistic and probabilistic constructions of the
population corresponded to an anti-statist discourse that located sover-
eignty at the level of the individual and that relied on a consensual model of
government. Whether the aggregates of population statistics were ‘‘real’’ or
not was a non-issue in England. Here the attitude towards statistics was
more pragmatic, oriented towards making numbers useful for practical
purposes. Statistics was seeking to make the population amenable to
intervention, and aggregate representations of the latter were not associ-
ated with any strong political symbolism. Within such context, numbers
had more an instrumental than symbolic role, they were primarily tools of
intervention (Schweber, 2006).
16
Of?cial data provided by the CVN in December 2011. Periodic updates
are available at www.salve.it.
R. Samiolo / Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402 397
in numbers’’ (Porter, 1995b) remained, in this speci?c
institutional context, rather weak. Porter’s work suggests
that objectivity and standardisation are demanded in
the presence of external pressures and mistrust in techni-
cal elites, when authority is weak, institutions are
fragmented and disciplinary boundaries permeable
(Porter, 1992, 1995b; see also: Espeland & Stevens,
1998; Fligstein, 1998). In these circumstances, subjective
professional judgement and bureaucratic discretion
become dif?cult to defend and the alleged impersonality
of numbers turns out to be more appealing. Institutional
diversity and fragmentation, in situations where decisions
must be presented as collective and democratic, call for
quanti?cation even if the latter comes at the cost of sim-
pli?cation and loss of accuracy (Daston, 1995; Rottenburg,
2009, p. 190).
The institutional context analysed here shares many
of these characteristics, but crucial differences remain.
As mentioned above, the request to subject the project
to an environmental and economic appraisal was
accompanied by distrust in the CVN and the Water
Magistrate and by the preoccupation to subject deci-
sions to greater ‘‘technical and scienti?c control’’. The
promoters of the mobile barriers saw their discretion
challenged and contested. Furthermore, the appraisal of
the project was conducted in the context of a complex
division of labour between levels of government, and
through the contribution of several disciplines repre-
sented in a variety of groups and commissions.
17
In such
circumstances, with no single group of experts able to
claim full authority over the problems at stake, where
distrust in bureaucratic discretion was widespread, an
appetite for impersonality and ‘‘mechanical objectivity’’
(Porter, 1995b), a need to back up individual positions
with explicit, impersonal and replicable decision criteria,
could be expected.
However, such appetite was combined with an opposite
one, and ultimately counteracted by it. Behind the request
to involve international experts lay not so much an aspira-
tion towards impersonality – understood as ‘‘a view from
nowhere’’, a knowledge independent of the subject – but
rather towards impartiality – ‘‘a view from somewhere
else’’, from an external arbiter in an open dispute. As men-
tioned, the Municipality had invoked the involvement of
‘‘international institutions best able to guarantee impartial
work’’ (Consiglio Comunale di Venezia, 1995a, p. 8–9/10).
Fear of vested interests and the desire to open up the deci-
sion to public scrutiny mobilised not so much an ideal of
impersonality, but one of impartiality.
18
It was not enough
to involve a certain type of expertise in order to guide con-
?ict resolution, it was not simply a matter of taming politics
with science. Expertise was to be international: to be credi-
ble, it had to transcend the state. Its legitimacy derived less
from its scienti?c standing than from its being, symbolically
at least, external to the state and its internal divisions. The
appraisal of the project was con?gured from the start as
an arbitration on a dispute between con?icting subjects
within a divided state. It was the international origin of
the subject of the calculation that ultimately mattered, not
so much its attempted erasure via numbers and standard
decision rules.
Paradoxically, while the panel of international experts
sought indeed to provide an impersonal stance, a ‘‘view
from nowhere’’, the very act of their involvement defeated
the standardisation of the subject and the pursuit of
mechanical objectivity. Precisely because the subject, the
national decision maker, was seen as problematic, as too
politicised and divided, as something to be transcended,
it remained vividly in the background as something to be
reformed by an alternative authority coming from some-
where else. But even the international experts ended up
being perceived as one more subject in the dispute, and
while deemed by many to be more credible than national
experts, they could not bring mechanical objectivity.
Cost–bene?t calculations could not be reconciled because
from the start the subject of calculation was conceived as
fragmented and polycentric, and calculation was mobilised
not so much to ‘‘erase’’ it, but to adjudicate the controversy
to one of the actors involved via a process of international
arbitration. Calculation was enrolled within a political
ethos which on the surface aspired to achieve a ‘‘view from
nowhere’’, but deep down seemed to accept that all views
are ultimately from somewhere and that in order to be
credible cost–bene?t analysis had to be validated by ex-
perts coming from ‘‘elsewhere’’, external to what were
seen as politically saturated national boundaries.
19
Con-
fronted with fear of bias, vested interests and arbitrariness,
this speci?c institutional environment did not react by
replacing trust in experts with trust in numbers. It did not
rationalise the state via the establishment of impersonal
knowledge; rather, it credited expertise only if it tran-
scended the state whose institutions were in question by
enrolling an international arbiter.
This further explains why statistical aggregates were so
problematic, why processes of aggregation could not be
17
All the groups involved in the appraisal were, to some extent, inter-
disciplinary. The working group of Venice Municipality, whose compo-
sition changed several times, included engineers as well as experts of
environmental legislation, ecology, soil defence, geotechnics. The cost-
bene?t analysis in the EIS was conducted primarily by engineers. The
disciplines represented in the group of international experts included
hydrodynamics, environmental economics, ?ood risk management,
ecology, environmental science and climate change. Members of the
national commission for EIA were all experts of environmental
appraisals, but with different educational backgrounds, from planning
and architecture to biology and law.
18
Impersonal: ‘‘Not pertaining to or connected with any particular person
or persons; having no personal reference or connection’’. Impartial: ‘‘not
partial; not favouring one party or side more than another; unprejudiced,
unbiased, fair, just, equitable’’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2000). The notion
of impersonality, as used in the philosophy and sociology of science
(Daston, 1992; Nagel, 1986; Shapin, 1998), refers to the ambition to
separate knowledge and knower, to achieve a ‘‘depersonalised’’ and
objective knowledge, independent of its subject. The notion of impartiality
has a rather different connotation: it points to a fair, unbiased, just,
unprejudiced, independent, disinterested subject, such as an arbiter or
judge in a dispute, but not to the complete erasure of the subject.
19
Appeals to international organisations as a way to overcome internal
political con?ict and bureaucratic fragmentation have appeared on other
occasions in the history of the safeguard of Venice (see: Montanelli, 1969;
Senato della Repubblica, 1972, speech by Lanfrè; Italia Nostra, 2011).
398 R. Samiolo/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402
taken for granted and were immediately ?ngered as
debatable commensurations of too disparate entities.
Commensurating different parts of the territory via aver-
ages and aggregations in order to make the latter amenable
to large scale intervention establishes a view from the cen-
tre, it presupposes the existence of a centre that sees itself as
such. Only then can the various parts of the territory and
the population combined under its gaze in the act of aggre-
gation be recognised as belonging to the same entity. Only
then can ‘‘action at a distance’’ succeed. If such centre is
contested, if more than one centre exists, if the territory
is disputed and, crucially, if the decision maker posits the
existence of an alternative authority to its own, then com-
mensuration will inevitably be highly symbolic of such
political divisions; it will appear as unnatural and stir all
sorts of preoccupations.
In the appraisal studied here the utilitarian spirit of
cost–bene?t analysis was defeated. The question of identi-
fying the best, most rational ?ood protection scheme was
superseded by the problem of the coexistence of different
political centres. The problem of maximising bene?t/cost
ratios and of optimising ef?ciency and effectiveness re-
treated back into the problem of composing the internal
administrative con?ict by means of an international arbi-
ter. The ideal of the ‘‘rational actor’’ who can select the
optimal solution was dissolved in a polycentric political
subject whose problem was not so much optimal choice,
but coexistence and internal articulation.
The depersonalisation of the decision making subject by
means of cost–bene?t analysis was not achieved. The at-
tempt to democratise the decision making process took
the contours of a ‘‘diplomatic’’ issue (seeking allies or arbi-
ters beyond the state) rather than of a ‘‘policy’’ issue
(establishing the optimal solution). Expertise was never
seen nor invoked as truly separate from its subject, as truly
impersonal. Impartiality remained more important than
impersonality. Commensuration and standardisation were
superseded by arbitration and adjudication. They could not
be institutionalised, as in their background persisted the
idea of a ?awed and fragmented political subject to be
transcended, to be reformed from the outside rather than
rationalised from within.
Conclusions
This study shows that commensuration is not simply
something that may be achieved or lost, furthered or
resisted. If commensuration is ubiquitous (Espeland &
Stevens, 1998), it is not an invariant and monolithic phe-
nomenon. Building upon the work of Espeland and Stevens
(see also Huault & Rainelli-Weiss, 2011), a more systematic
investigation of different modes of commensuration, and
the different calculative tools and programmatic ambitions
which may sustain them, can be envisaged. The cost–ben-
e?t analysis studied here took place against the back-
ground of a discourse of uniqueness and speci?city (the
lagoon as ‘‘the only model of itself’’) which opposed an ab-
stract space of calculation to a speci?c place which could
only be described and calculated locally. In so doing, such
discourse limited commensuration but also promoted dif-
ferent degrees of it. Different conceptions of the object of
calculation – Venice and its lagoon – corresponded to dif-
ferent approaches to the costing of ?ood damages.
Furthermore, the commensuration of the different traits
of Venice and its lagoon remained limited because of a spe-
ci?c way of conceiving its subject, the decision maker.
Commensuration requires a standardising subject, a centre
of calculation that conceives itself as such, where records
can be collected and compared and categories of equiva-
lence developed (Latour, 1987). When multiple centres of
calculation exist, objectivity becomes problematic and at-
tempts to ‘‘escape from perspective’’ are likely to appear.
As this study shows, whether calculation succeeds in over-
coming con?icting modes of valuing and thus in standar-
dising the subject of calculation by giving it the stamp of
impersonality, whether it enables attempts to escape from
perspective and to ‘‘objectify’’ the world, crucially, also de-
pends on how its subject is conceived.
A variety of state con?gurations and programmes, as
well as perceptions of the political subject, can help ex-
plain the different development of national accounting
and statistics in different institutional contexts (Miller,
1990; Patriarca, 1996; Schweber, 2006). Analogously, in
the case analysed here, behind the enrolment of cost–ben-
e?t analysis lay a speci?c self-representation of the state as
a fragmented and polycentric entity in need to be reformed
from the outside via an international arbiter. This problem-
atisation of the decision maker institutionalised the very
divisions which calculation should in principle have
overcome.
Thus, this case study alerts us to the fact that in order to
understand the objectifying potential of economic calcula-
tion and its ability to enable ‘‘action at a distance’’, atten-
tion must be devoted to the real and imagined subjects
that remain in its background. Even at a time when quan-
titative decision rules are increasingly global standards, or
when ?nancial accounting is increasingly ‘‘without a state’’
(Power, 2009), ways of imagining the collective are still
powerful means of articulating the possibilities for eco-
nomic calculation. While standard setting in accounting
appears to be increasingly done in the name of an abstract,
delocalised and mythical individual ‘‘user’’, discursively
constructed through the categories of ?nancial economics
(Young, 2006), such rational and responsible individual,
the hero of neoliberal governance, is perhaps a less ubiqui-
tous ideal than it might be assumed. In the case considered
here, cost–bene?t analysis was not conducted in the name
of this myth, to foster an ideal of instrumental rationality,
but to adjudicate on a con?ict within a divided collective
actor whose very multiplicity and articulations were para-
doxically reinforced, not erased, by calculation.
As Daston and Galison point out, objectivity is to be
studied as an ever-evolving aspiration. The separation be-
tween knower and knowledge which has come to epito-
mise modernity is an erratic process constantly
underway, which sees ‘‘new selves and epistemic virtues,
new ways of being and ways of knowing, appear at irregu-
lar intervals’’ (2007, p. 375). In order to understand the role
of accounting and economic calculation as one of the prin-
cipal means through which objectivity, commensuration
and standardisation are pursued, this variety of ‘‘selves’’
and ‘‘epistemic virtues’’ has to be addressed.
R. Samiolo / Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402 399
Ways of counting and accounting, no matter how uni-
versalistic their ambitions or globalising the discourses
that sustain them, become variously emplaced and dis-
placed. Such emplacements and displacements need to
be considered in order to appreciate the variety of modes
in which accounting can create ‘‘calculating selves and
calculable spaces’’ (Miller, 1992). If calculation implies ‘‘a
change of values – a move away from the personal, and a
vast expansion of the public domain’’ (Porter, 1995a, p.
83), the way in which the public domain is imagined and
de?ned cannot be taken for granted; rather, it should be
investigated as one of the conditions of possibility for the
rise and spread of economic calculation.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Martin Giraudeau, Silvia Jordan, Andrea
Mennicken, Peter Miller for offering instructive comments
on earlier drafts of this paper. Special thanks are due to
Mike Power for his on-going intellectual support and
encouragement. The AC500 seminars at the LSE have pro-
vided an invaluable intellectual environment for this
study. I also wish to thank participants to the Management
Accounting as a Social and Organisational Practice Workshop
2008 in Paris and the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on
Accounting Conference 2009 in Innsbruck for their useful
questions and insights. The paper has greatly bene?ted
from the observations and suggestions of two anonymous
reviewers. Finally, I am grateful to the government of?-
cials, academics, researchers and other experts who shared
with me their views on the case and helped me collect the
materials used in this research.
Appendix. Organisations involved in the safeguard of
Venice
Committee for policy coordination and control
[Comitato di Indirizzo Coordinamento e Controllo]
Created by the second special law for Venice in 1984, it
is responsible for the strategy, coordination, budgeting and
monitoring of all safeguard initiatives in Venice and its la-
goon. It is chaired by the Prime Minister and includes ?ve
Ministers (Cultural Heritage, Environment, Public Works
and Infrastructure, University and Scienti?c Research,
Transportation), the president of the Water Magistrate,
the Mayors of Venice and Chioggia, two representatives
from other local authorities in the lagoon area, and the
president of the Veneto Region.
Water Magistrate
[Magistrato alle Acque] www.magisacque.it
The Magistrate is a technical agency of the Ministry for
Public Works and Infrastructure in charge of the hydraulic
management of a great part of the North-East of Italy. It
operates in the Venice Lagoon mainly through its conces-
sionaire Consorzio Venezia Nuova, but it directly manages
a limited set of services such as those related to the reduc-
tion of pollution and contamination from the industrial
area within the Venice lagoon.
Consortium for a New Venice
[Consorzio Venezia Nuova – CVN] www.salve.it
Founded in 1982, the Consortium is the ‘‘concession-
aire’’ of the Ministry of Public Works and Infrastructure
and of its local branch the Water Magistrate. It is responsi-
ble for implementing all the measures to safeguard Venice
and its lagoon falling under the remit of the national gov-
ernment. It consists of a group of public and private com-
panies and consortia. In 1995 such concession was
formally invalidated with law 206/1995, but all contractual
arrangements and the legal effects preceding the passing of
this law were maintained valid. That is, plans, projects and
works already approved by the Water Magistrate before
1995 will remain under the operational responsibility of
the CVN until completion. The monopolistic position of
the CVN has been the object of an appeal to the European
Commission for infringement of European competition
rules. In 2002, a compromise was found between such
rules and the role of the CVN, in that the Water Magistrate
must now subject new projects to public tendering. Pre-
existing ones, like the mobile barriers, remain under its
control.
Venice Municipality
[Comune di Venezia] www.comune.venezia.it
The ?rst special law (1973) made the Municipality
responsible for the restoration of the urban fabric, includ-
ing the provision and maintenance of public infrastructure
and canals (the secondary network not managed by the
Water Magistrate). These duties are now undertaken
through Insula Spa.
Insula Spa
www.insula.it
Insula Spa is a public limited company owned by the
Municipality (72%), the Regional government of Veneto
(1%) and Veritas Spa (27%) (www.gruppoveritas.it), a local,
publicly owned, multi-utility company. It was originally
established as a mixed public-private company in 1997,
and became entirely publicly owned in 2007. It plans, ten-
ders and coordinates works and services relating to the
maintenance of canals, bridges, façades and foundations
of buildings facing canals, pavements, embankments and,
in short, of the entire urban fabric.
Panel of ?ve international experts
The panel was appointed with the Decree of the Presi-
dent of the Council of Ministers of 1 February 1996 (mod-
i?ed by subsequent Decrees of 10 July 1997 and 27
September 1997). It comprised of the following members:
Prof. Philippe Bourdeau (coordinator) IGEAT, Université Li-
bre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles (Belgium); Prof. Jean-Marie
Martin, Environment Institute, Joint Research Centre, Euro-
pean Commission, Ispra, Italy; Prof. Chiang C. Mei, Massa-
chusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge: MA, USA;
Prof. Ignazio Musu, Facoltà di Economia, Università Ca’
Foscari di Venezia, Italy; Prof. Pier Vellinga, Institute for
400 R. Samiolo/ Accounting, Organizations and Society 37 (2012) 382–402
Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The
Netherlands.
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