Shaping port governance: the territorial trajectories of reform patterns

The evolutionary public-private context drove many economic sectors to undertake profound dynamics of de-centralisation and de-regulation. Across such transformations, the notion of governance acquired a key role in the understanding of the process. In recent years, seaports have experienced a dramatic wave of changes in governance settings. The academic literature, aware of such trends, produced many studies and reports. The World Bank outlined a well-known framework of major governance models. The mainstream approach, however, mostly proposed general and de-contextualised models. Therefore, these were unable to catch the specificities of various local environments, namely to "embed" general evolutionary schemes into specific institutional and economic contexts. This paper is willing to analyse the major variables related to the notion of embeddedness in ports and affecting governance settings. For this purpose, the complexity and the heterogeneity of the institutional framework (i), the multi-layered decisional chain (ii) and the socio-cultural environment (iii) will be deeply studied and discussed. In facing port reform pathways, the paper also brings a dynamic view of such variables, depicting major regulatory trajectories. The theoretical discussion will be enriched and supported by a comparative case-study France-Italy. The manuscript shows the effects of local forces in shaping general national port reform schemes; it examines the relation between general evolutionary trends and embeddedness, also revealing the importance of both static and dynamic factors.