How is this different from the kind of traditional community engagement that a power company would conduct?
CONTI: We now recognize that successful projects are fully accepted by the local population. This doesn’t mean just a few people. It’s the entire community, including the local authorities, opinion makers, and all local stakeholders. If we don’t bring them on board at the beginning, we have no chance of making that investment fruitful. We have had bad experiences in the past, particularly in countries with a high density of population or a NIMBY [not in my backyard] culture. I heard another acronym the other day: DADA. It stands for “design, approve, develop, and abandon.” And that’s the dynamic for too many energy projects. That was more or less what happened in the Brindisi case, which Fernando and his coauthors described in Megacommunities. We invested, with British Gas, in a terminal for regasifying liquid natural gas, to be located in an economically depressed area in southern Italy. We assumed that there would be popular support. The project would bring cleaner energy, short-
