For a more competitive and sustainable territory: indicators and good practices

We are experiencing not only an economic crisis but also an environmental one. It is clear that we have reached the limit of the available resources. It is worth mentioning a reflection from Jurgen Habermas of fourty years ago (1975: 46): «With its increasing complexity, the system of world society shìfts its borders so far ahead in their environments that it ran into capacity limits [...] the ecological balances mark an absolute limit of development». In more recent times Nicholas Stern (2009) pointed out that the time to reverse course has already expired; the change must be drastic and immediate, to take advantage of the available technologies and to make courageous and radicals choices in the richest countries. These aspects of environmental crisis seem to intertwineto those of the financial and economic crisis. Nobody knows how to get out of this situation, but the importance of the territory is more and more clear. Expressions such as "the promotion of territorial excellence', "territorial chain" and "best practices" are increasingly common, as well as the need to have more "competitive" and "sustainable" territories. In this chapter, on the one hand, I stress the problematic nature of the relationship between competitiveness and sustainability; on the other hand, I show that sustainability can be more and more an added value for the competitiveness itself. I use some other qualitative and quantitative elements to do that. As regards the quantitative part, I just mention some of the indicators proposed to measure sustainability and competitiveness. As regards the qualitative one, I try to highlight some best practices that reconcile these two needs of the territory. In my contribution, of course, I take particular account of the logistics industry and business services in Emilia-Romagna.