Introduction

 On February 25th, 2023, in Taranto, Italy, a demonstration was convened by the Association ‘Genitori Tarantini’ (Taranto Parents) to protest the adoption by the Italian government of decree n. 2 of January 5th, 2023. The demonstration took place in Piazza Vittoria, where attendants gathered and raised banners: “Mass genocide is happening in Taranto”, “No immunity from prosecution. Who pollutes must pay”. When the actual demonstration began, several people took turns talking from the main stage, including the spokesperson of the Association, who was joined by three other people: one held a banner saying, “We support the judiciary”, another one held a cardboard shield with the expression “Criminal immunity” on it, and another one was dressed like a judge, with his hands tied with laces. These banners and costumes conveyed vividly the reason why the demonstration was called. With decree n. 2/2023, the state government had granted immunity from prosecution for possible crimes committed in connection to the production activity of the steel factory ‘Ilva’.Footnote 1

Ilva, one of the largest steel mills in Europe, began its operations in Taranto in 1964 and quickly became the town’s largest employer, ensuring a living to thousands of people in the Taranto area (Barca & Leonardi, 2016; Di Fabbio, 2011; Romeo, 2019). Over the years, however, the impact of Ilva on public health has become increasingly concerning. In recent years, in particular, epidemiological investigations have found that Taranto has a critical public health situation (SENTIERI, 2011, 2014, 2016, 2019, 2023), and have identified the local industries as the sources responsible for it (Gennaro et al., 2022; Marinaccio et al., 2011; Renzetti et al., 2021; Vigotti et al., 2014; Vimercati et al., 2016). Taranto is, in fact, home to several industries beside Ilva, including a cement plant, an oil refinery, a shipyard, and a navy yard. While therefore toxic pollution in Taranto might originate from different industrial sources, two epidemiological reports have explicitly found a causal link between Ilva’s production and mortality and morbidity in Taranto (Forastiere et al., 2012, Alessandrini et al., 2016).

The question that follows is, then, why is Ilva still operating, considering its documented effects on Taranto’s public health? Why is the company allowed to produce, if its operations have a recognized negative effect on the population’s wellbeing? The answer to this question is also legal; Ilva has been allowed to continue producing by a favorable legal framework, which has upheld the pre-condition for Ilva to operate as per Italian law, namely the ‘integrated environmental authorization’, commonly referred to as ‘AIA’ (acronym of Autorizzazione Integrata Ambientale).

Research on the Ilva case mostly builds upon an implicit understanding that the factory still operates thanks to favorable politics promoted by the Italian state. Yet, a more in-depth analysis of the specific role of the law within the broader politico-economic strategy of the Italian state is currently missing. Without this kind of knowledge, one might risk overdetermining the role of politico-economic arrangements that, although fundamental, might not be the only factor explaining why Ilva continues operating despite its effect on Taranto’s public health. As I show in this article, the law too has played a key role in the production and reproduction of the conditions that have enabled Ilva to continue operating and, accordingly, reproduced social harm in Taranto.

In particular, this article shows how the law has become, for a seven-year period, an avenue where the Italian state and Ilva have established a “symbiotic relationship” (Tombs, 2012) which has facilitated the production and reproduction of harmful corporate behaviors. The analysis focuses on seven years (2011-2017) that are critical for the recent history of Ilva. In these seven years, the state adamantly created a favorable legal environment for Ilva to continue producing, by adopting laws that repeatedly upheld Ilva’s AIA, by amending it or postponing its complete implementation. The laws are presented in juxtaposition with epidemiological reports and public health research on Taranto released in those seven years. The presentation in a chronological order of the sequence of laws and epidemiological reports shows how the Italian state has responded to the accumulation of evidence on Taranto’s public health and how, by doing so, it has created the legal conditions for social harm to be produced and reproduced in Taranto.

This article contributes to broader criminological debates surrounding state-corporate crime and social harm. By focusing on this seven-year period of Ilva’s recent history, this paper shows how the “symbiotic relationship” (Tombs, 2012) between the Italian state and Ilva concretizes in the law, thus offering an empirical example of how “regimes of permission” (Whyte, 2014) are engrained in the extant legal framework. Furthermore, this article contributes to criminological research on social harm by discussing the role of the law in the production and reproduction of harmful corporate practices.

Taranto and its steel factory: A brief history and a literature review

Taranto is a city of a little less than two hundred thousand inhabitants located in the Puglia Region, in the South of Italy. The latter is an area of Italy that has been characterized by an unequal level of socioeconomic development compared to the North of the country, a situation commonly referred to as Italy’s ‘Southern Question’ (see e.g., Schneider, 1998). Accordingly, in the aftermath of Italy becoming a Republic in 1946, the state developed a program aimed to ‘modernize’ the South of Italy. The establishment of Ilva in the early 1960s was part of this development program.Footnote 2 The factory began its operations in 1964 and quickly became the city’s largest employer, obtaining a position of dominance in the local economy, which became heavily dependent on Ilva (Barca & Leonardi, 2016; Di Fabbio, 2011).

Furthermore, Ilva quickly revealed its effects on the local environment. Alliegro (2020) shows that environmental concerns surrounding the steel factory’s operations were raised since the very early days of its operations, both by official institutions and by ordinary citizens. These long-standing, accumulative confrontations on the environmental impact of Ilva’s production gained momentum in the 2000s, when civil society increasingly mobilized against the factory and generated evidence of the presence of pollutants in the local food chain.

This finding pushed the local judiciary to investigate, ordering the execution of two expert reports, a chemical and an epidemiological one. The former found high concentrations of pollutants coming from the factory (Sanna et al. 2012), while the latter found that Ilva had a serious impact on the local people’s public health (Forastiere et al. 2012). Following these results, a local judge ordered the requisition of the ‘hot areas’ of the factory, on 25 July 2012. The closure of the factory ignited the social conflict in Taranto. Several workers protested against the judiciary’s ordinance, claiming that “it is better to die of cancer than of hunger” (see Galeazzi, 2012). At the same time, many local organizations endorsed the judiciary’s action, appreciating its positive effects for the local public health.

Many scholars have examined the socioenvironmental conflict of Taranto, offering sociological analyses (Panico, 2020), reconstruction of narrative responses by locals (Seger, 2022), and ethnographic accounts on the formation of subjectivities in town (Ippolito, 2022; Jokela-Pansini, 2022; Jokela-Pansini & Militz, 2022). A strand of critical scholarship has explored the historical conditions that paved the way for Ilva to be established in Taranto, in the South of Italy, the subaltern part of the Italian economy. With its steel production, Greco (2016) argues, Taranto sustains the conditions for the North of Italy to maintain its wealth disparity vis-à-vis the South. Barca and Leonardi (2016) argue that the Ilva case is a paradigmatic example of environmental injustice, where workers and citizens are faced with an impossible choice between jobs and health.

Further, Lai et al. (2019) analyzed the Italian government’s discourse, showing how official documents and laws made visible the risks associated to job-losses, while contextually silencing the risks associated to the company’s production. Greco and Bagnardi (2018) interviewed local trade unions and environmental associations and discovered a polarized debate between environmentalists (‘pro-health’) and industrialists (‘pro-jobs’), permeated by technical analyses disentangled from wider political considerations. Finally, Greco and Chiarello (2016) maintained that a key moment in Ilva’s history was its privatization in 1995, when the company was sold by the state to the Riva Group. Privatization disrupted a fragile-but-existing equilibrium where political actors (such as the state) played an active role ensuring that Ilva fulfilled its social role of preserving employment. Privatization led to a deregulation that diminished the role of the state and enabled the company to obtain a position of dominance over political institutions and civil society.

This article advances the scholarship on the socioenvironmental conflict of Taranto both empirically and theoretically. Empirically, it offers a reconstruction of the state’s lawmaking activity on Ilva from 2011 to 2017, accompanied by a review of key public health studies published in the same period. Theoretically, this article contributes a socio-legal reading of the Ilva case, which illuminates how state laws have been central in creating the conditions for Ilva’s harmful industrial production to continue. To further elaborate on this point, I introduce the theoretical underpinnings of this article.

Theoretical framework

The analytical lens of this article is grounded in two overarching concepts: state-corporate crime and social harm. The concept of ‘state-corporate crime’ was introduced to denote criminal or harmful actions that resulted from a direct cooperation between a state institution and a private corporation (Kramer et al., 2002). Kramer and Michalowski further elaborated the concept, distinguishing between state-initiated and state-facilitated corporate crime. While the former denotes those situations where corporations engage in harmful behavior following the direction of the government, the latter applies to episodes where the state is not directly involved in producing an illegal or harmful activity, but rather operates on its regulatory capacity to create favorable legal conditions for a corporation to engage in deviant behaviors.

These formulations of the state-corporate crime concept have been criticized for falling into an empiricist fallacy. In particular, Tombs (2012) and Whyte (2014) argued that the scholarship on state-corporate crime focuses on “moments of rupture” (Ibid., p. 214), namely pathological deviations from an ordinary, normal relationship between the state and corporations. These moments of rupture are, e.g., single events of regulatory failures that lead to a big incident. By focusing on disruptive events only, the state-corporate crime literature hides the ever-going underlying relationship between the state and corporations, which is by itself conducive of deviant corporate behaviors. Accordingly, both Tombs and Whyte argue that state-corporate crime studies should highlight the structural conditions that enable a certain crime or harmful action to occur. The goal is thus to show the “symbiotic relationship” (Tombs, 2012, p. 170) and the “regimes of permissions” (Whyte, 2014), namely how a certain “architecture of power” (Ibid., p. 241), conducive of criminal or harmful corporate behavior, is engrained in the relationship between the state and corporations.

Harm is the second bedrock of this article’s conceptual framework. I avoid speaking of ‘crime’ in that I do not direct my attention towards the commission of crime per se in connection to Ilva’s production activity.Footnote 3 This choice is justified in light of the political contingency of the category of crime (Hillyard & Tombs, 2007; Matthews & Kauzlarich, 2007). Through its political power, the state can directly intervene on the existing legal frameworks and arbitrarily label or un-label certain deviant or harmful behaviors as criminal or non-criminal. Criminological investigations have therefore increasingly directed their attention towards studying ‘social harm’ rather than crimes as defined by the regulatory framework.

In particular, Pemberton (2015) argues that social harm is defined as impairments that “compromise the fulfilment of human needs” (p. 24, italics in the original). He argues that harm can take the form of physical or mental injuries (physical harm), as well as impairments to the possibilities to fulfill one’s own autonomy (autonomy harm) and identity (relational harm). Harm is therefore “socially mediated” (Pemberton, 2015, p. 24), namely it is the result of structural arrangements that create the conditions for harm to occur and be reproduced. Among these structural arrangements one can include the existing regulatory framework, as it is enacted and implemented by the state government in power.

The conceptual connection between state-corporate crime and social harm is thus established; the state can create a legal framework that is conducive to corporate practices that are harmful, namely, they cause impairments to the well-being of a certain population. Accordingly, this investigation is focused on seven years of harmful corporate practices that have been facilitated by a state-corporate “symbiosis” in state law. This article thus contributes to the scholarship on state-corporate crime (Bernat & Whyte, 2017; Ciocchini & Greener, 2023; Davies, 2022; Greener, 2020; Michalowski & Brown, 2020; Osoria, 2021; Pons-Hernández, 2022; Stamouli et al., 2023) and its connection to social harm (Banks & Waters, 2023; de Nardin Budó, 2021; Gladkova, 2023; Haines & Macdonald, 2021; Simončič, 2021). By showing how for seven years the law has represented a privileged avenue for the Italian state and Ilva to establish their relationship, this study enriches the scholarship on state-corporate crime and social harm with a case study that focuses on how the “symbiosis” (Tombs, 2012) between the state and corporations becomes a legal symbiosis, conducive to harmful corporate behavior.

Methodological design

This study concentrates on the years 2011-2017. The selection of this seven-year period is justified given that, during it, the stateFootnote 4 engaged in compulsive and frenetic lawmaking over the Ilva case, repeatedly changing the existing legal framework in order to uphold the legality of Ilva’s AIA, the legal pre-requisite for the company to continue producing. In fact, 2011 is the year when the AIA was initially granted to Ilva, while 2017 is the year when the state granted a final extension of the AIA’s validity until the 23 of August 2023. The legislation enacted in this seven-year period, therefore, represents a paradigmatic example of how the state and corporations can establish a “symbiosis” (Tombs, 2012) in the law. Contextually, during this seven-year period important knowledge was accumulated in relation to Taranto’s public health, and the impact of Ilva’s production on it. Accordingly, this seven-year period also presents relevant data in relation to harmful corporate practices.

This article follows the progressive adoption of laws and accumulation of public health and epidemiological evidence in this seven-year period. Data has been collected following these steps. For the laws, I searched the string ‘Ilva AND Taranto’ on the official database on Italian laws called ‘Normattiva’, for the period 2011-2017. It returned 12 results. The search was then complemented by consulting two webpages, respectively of the Italian Parliament (Parlamento Italiano, n.d.) and the Italian Minister of the Environment (Ministero dell’Ambiente e della Sicurezza Energetica, n.d.), which both included a list of laws specifically adopted for the Ilva case until 2018. After this second screening, 7 additional laws were collected. 11 laws were excluded as they were decrees that did not relate to the validity, implementation, and execution of the AIA. This led to a dataset composed of 19 laws.

For public health research, I collected all the six SENTIERI reportsFootnote 5 and the two publicly funded cohort studies conducted in Taranto in 2012 and 2016. Then, to find publications on public health research on Taranto, I inserted the search string ‘Taranto AND “public health”’ on Scopus since 2011. In my first search I did not exclude publications released after 2017 because this allowed me to collect also the most recent literature on Taranto’s public health, whose bibliographies could include relevant articles for the period 2011-2017. This search returned 23 documents. 8 did not provide findings on Taranto’s environmental pollution and its connection to the local public health, and were thus out of scope. The 15 articles’ bibliography were reviewed to find additional literature on Taranto and public health for the period 2011-2017. This search allowed me to identify 17 articles on Taranto’s public health published between 2011 and 2017, in addition to the three SENTIERI reports released between 2011 and 2017 and the two cohort studies.

Data analysis followed these criteria. Most public health research has “Results” and “Conclusions” sections, where I focused my attention to understand the overall findings for Taranto’s public health. For the analysis of the laws, I conducted a systematic content analysis (see Salehijam, 2018). In light of my research interest of understanding how each law dealt with the legal prerequisite for Ilva to operate, I developed an a priori code to encapsulate those provisions that related to the validity, implementation, and execution of the AIA. This code allowed me to follow the evolution of the state’s approach to Ilva’s authorization to produce, detecting throughout the database the progressive adoption of provisions increasingly in favor to the company. No qualitative data analysis software was necessary to conduct the analysis Table 1.

Table 1 The list of laws, public health research and epidemiological reports
Full size table

The sequence of laws and public health research on Taranto (2011–2017)

All translations of public health research and legal texts are mine.

2011–2012: The AIA and Ilva as a ‘factory of strategic interest for the nation’

Taranto is one of the Italian Polluted Sites (IPSs) identified by the Italian Minister of Health as areas of Italy that require monitoring due to the presence of sources of pollution (e.g., industries), that represent a potential danger to human health. Accordingly, in 2007 a project named ‘SENTIERI’ was initiated by the Minister of Health, with the declared goal of studying mortality and morbidity in the IPSs. The first report was published in 2010 and included the methodological design of SENTIERI.

Meanwhile, Ilva was conducting its negotiations with the Italian Minister of the Environment for the granting of the AIA. According to the Italian Single Text on the Environment,Footnote 7 certain industries must obtain an authorization, the AIA, which prescribes those measures that the industry must follow to safeguard the environment and public health. The law also prescribes that, when there are breaches of the AIA, the relevant authority must adopt certain measures, including a warning, the withdrawal of the AIA, the suspension or the shutdown of the activity altogether. Ilva’s first AIA was granted on 4 August 2011.

Later that year, the second SENTIERI report was released, which included the first results on mortality in the IPSs for the period 1995-2002. For Taranto, SENTIERI found excesses of mortality and, overall, an “unhealthy living environment” (SENTIERI, 2011, p. 137). These results were echoed in public health research published the same year. In particular, Marinaccio et al. (2011) had found a significant association between cancer risk and residential proximity to three of the main areas of Ilva (the steel mill, the coke plant, and the mineral deposit) as well as with the shipbuilding industry of Taranto.

Subsequently, Esposito et al. (2012) released a study on the presence of dioxins in Taranto’s environment and warned authorities to implement measures to avoid dioxins entering the food chain. On 1 March 2012, the epidemiological study commissioned by the Taranto judiciary was released. It found a causal nexus between Ilva’s production activity and mortality and morbidity in Taranto. Based upon this report, the Taranto’s judiciary ordered the seizure of the ‘hot areas’ of the steel factory, as well as the immediate stoppage of its production, on 25 July 2012. The report also demonstrated that Ilva’s AIA was already in need of an update (Romeo, 2019). A new procedure for the amendment of the AIA was in fact opened, and it ended on 26 October 2012 with a new AIA granted to Ilva. This second AIA included 94 specific measures that the company had to implement within the 8 of March 2016. Meanwhile, Campo et al. (2012) found that exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons among workers of the coke furnaces of Ilva and the general population of Taranto, although lower than before, still represented a health risk, and pushed for “further efforts to improve workplace conditions”.

Then, on 3 December 2012, the government directly responded to the judiciary’s seizure by adopting decree n. 207. This decree prescribed that “for factories of strategic interest for the nation […] in case there is an absolute necessity to safeguard employment and production, the Minister of the Environment can authorize […] the prosecution of production for a period of no more than 36 months […].”, specifying that this provision “applies also in case the judicial authority has seized the factory”. These provisions were drafted in generic and abstract terms, potentially applicable to any “factory of strategic interest for the nation”, a new legal category coined with this decree. Article 3 of the decree, however, explicitly ruled that Ilva shall be considered a factory of strategic interest for the nation. Decree 207 was later confirmed by the Italian parliament with conversion law 231.Footnote 8

Meanwhile, the SENTIERI report was updated specifically for Taranto. In this report, focused on the years 2003-2009, Comba et al. (2012) found, in relation to mortality, a situation worse than the rest of Puglia. The report showed excesses of death for diseases for which a correlation with the exposure to industrial pollutants is suspected on the basis of available epidemiological evidence. Researchers also concluded that certain diseases could be caused by a combination of several factors, including smoking and unhealthy eating habits. In the same period, Iavarone et al. (2012) published a study on the blood levels of certain metals and other substances among farmers, and found a strong association with the age of the farmers and the distance of the farm from the industrial site of Taranto.

2013–2014: The constant modifications and postponements of the AIA and the environmental plan

In 2013, more public health research came out. Bianco et al. (2013) found high levels of toxic chemicals in breast milk samples of women residing near the industrial area of Taranto. Vimercati et al. (2013) found high concentrations of metals in the urine of 300 residents of Taranto. Spada et al. (2013) investigated the presence of heavy metals in the mussels collected from the Puglia coast, including the Taranto area, and concluded that levels were lower than the legal limits and did not represent a hazard for a moderate consumer. In a similar study, however, Giandomenico et al. (2013) found levels of chemical compounds higher than the legal threshold, the highest values being in the Taranto sea, and related this finding with the “anthropogenic activities” of a “disused shipyard and an iron and steel factory” (p. 246).

On 4 June 2013, the government passed decree 61, whose recitals acknowledged that there is “evidence of a serious risk for the environment and public health deriving also from a lack of enforcement of the authorization”. The government thus explicitly admitted that the AIA was not properly implemented, a situation that according to the Single Text on the Environment should have triggered the adoption of precautionary measures by the Minister of the Environment. Instead, drawing on the fact that Ilva is a “factory of strategic interest for the nation”, decree 61 prescribed that Ilva shall be put under external management by a special commissioner nominated by the government itself, “in order to preserve the continuity of the industrial activity and to use the company’s resources to cover the costs necessary to implement the AIA”. The structure of this decree was the same of decree 207/2012: there was an article 1 drafted in generic terms, thus potentially applicable to any “factory of strategic interest for the nation”, followed by an article in which Ilva was explicitly indicated as a subject falling within the scope of the law.

Furthermore, decree 61/2013 gave the Minister of the Environment the power to nominate a collegium of three experts who, having consulted the special commissioner (now in charge of Ilva’s management), shall draft an “environmental plan” for “safeguarding the environment and the health of workers and population and to prevent the risk of relevant injuries”, and which “represents a modification of the AIA”. Furthermore, the decree’s conversion law (law n. 89 of 3 August 2013) modified the final deadline for the fulfilment of the environmental plan. Originally, the AIA released on 26 October 2012 had to be fulfilled by the 8 of March 2016. Law 89/2013 set a new deadline on 3 August 2016.

Several additional laws regulating the Ilva case were adopted afterwards. Decree 101 of August 31 (and its conversion law 125) included a generic provision for “industries of strategic interest for the nation” that, however, was devoted to Ilva only. This provision authorized Ilva to build a landfill for special waste within the parameter of the factory, “to ensure compliance with the law and the AIA”. Then, Decree 136 and its conversion law 6 modified decree 61/2013 under several points, including one on administrative liability. Decree 136 prescribed that, “for acts and behaviors attributable to the external administration”, Ilva would not incur in administrative liability if it is managed in compliance with the environmental plan. Meanwhile, a new study on the presence of substances in the Taranto sea was released (Di Leo et al., 2014), concluding that the “widespread contamination” of the analyzed substances was “probably related to the strong influence of different anthropogenic determinants as steel factory cooling plant, harbor activities of Italian Military Navy, etc.” (p. 13205).

The environmental plan set forth by decree 61/2013 was adopted with decree of the President of the Council of Ministers (DPCM) of 14 March 2014, published on 8 May 2014. As it was originally intended to be, the plan explicitly modified the AIA. Out of the 94 provisions of the AIA, the plan modified 16, several of which allowed for substantial postponements for the adoption of measures to prevent pollutants spreading. For example, the covering of the areas for the deposit of powdery materials was postponed to January 2016, from an original deadline in October 2013.

A new update of the SENTIERI study was published in April 2014, expanding the scope of the analysis until 2010. It found an excess of “mortality for all causes, all cancers, circulatory and digestive system diseases, for both sexes” (SENTIERI, 2014, p. 100). Also in April 2014, Vigotti et al. (2014) published a study that confirmed that “mortality rates are higher than the regional ones for all causes, neoplasms and for respiratory and digestive diseases” (p. 651). In August 2014, Bustaffa et al. (2014) found for Taranto a positive association between presence of arsenic in urine and occupational exposure.

Finally, after only three months from the publication of DPCM 4 March 2014, the state adopted law 116/2014 and already changed the provisions on the implementation of the environmental plan, allowing for a partial implementation. The law in fact prescribed that the plan shall be considered implemented if, by 31 July 2015, the company has executed at least 80% of the provisions whose deadline was scheduled on 31 July 2015.

2015–2017: From immunity from prosecution to the postponement until 2023

On 5 January 2015, the government passed decree n. 1. Leveraging on the urgency to ensure the continuation of production for factories of strategic interest for the nation, the decree prescribed that “the actions performed for the execution of the [environmental] plan cannot give rise to criminal or administrative liability of the special commissioner and his/her delegates, because these actions represent the best precautionary rules for the safeguard of the environment, public health, public safety and workplace safety”. In other words, with decree 1/2015 and its conversion law 20, the government introduced immunity from prosecution for the special commissioner of Ilva, based on the argument that the environmental plan automatically prescribed the best possible measures for the preservation of health and safety.

Then, the government passed decree 92 of 4 July 2015, which circumvented, for a second time after 2012, the local judiciary’s seizure of Ilva’s property. The tribunal had in fact seized one of Ilva’s blast furnaces following the death of a worker. Investigations were ongoing for breach of safeguards for workplace safety (article 437 of the Italian criminal code). The government leveraged again on the necessity and urgency of ensuring the continuation of production of “factories of strategic interest for the nation that have been seized by the judiciary”. Decree 92/2015 was then abrogated by law 132 of 6 August 2015 which, however, reintroduced the same exact provision.

Meanwhile, more research was published on the contamination of pollutants in the local sea (Cardellicchio et al., 2016) In particular, Giandomenico et al. (2016) found concentrations of metals and other chemicals in marine organisms collected in the local sea, and concluded that “an extended remediation programme is necessary to safeguard marine ecosystem, human health and, not less important, the economic activities, in the Taranto marine area”.

Subsequently, with decree 191 of 4 December 2015 the government explicitly updated decree 1/2015 and prescribed that the ultimate deadline for the final adoption of the plan was on 31 December 2016. Its conversion law 13 of 1 February 2016 replaced the wording “31 December 2016” with “30 June 2017”, thus again extending the final deadline for the implementation of the plan. Subsequently, Gianicolo et al. (2016) published the results of a study on spatial mortality in Taranto, and concluded that air pollution spreading from the industrial site and socioeconomic status explain mortality differences among Taranto neighborhoods.

Then, with decree 98 of 9 June 2016, the government moved back regulating immunity from prosecution matters. Considering the supervened interest of the government to put Ilva out for sale to third private parties, the decree expanded the scope of the provisions on immunity from prosecution included in decree 1/2015, by extending it to potential lessees and buyers of Ilva. Decree 98/2016 also conferred the buyer the right to present modifications to the environmental plan and to ask for the postponement of the final deadline for its implementation.

In October 2016, a cohort study funded by the Puglia Region explicitly updated the cohort study of 2012 by Forastiere et al. (the one that led the judiciary to order the seizure of the factory). A press release was published on 3 October 2016, which declared in capital letters “THERE IS A CAUSAL NEXUS BETWEEN INDUSTRIAL EMISSIONS AND HEALTH DAMAGE” (see Regione Puglia 2016). More specifically, the study showed that trends of mortality in Taranto followed exactly the productivity trends of Ilva (Alessandrini et al., 2016, p. 68-69). The study also explicitly ruled out a causal nexus between trends of mortality in Taranto and habits such as smoking and alcohol consumption, thus asserting clearly what previous studies had not been able to exclude (see Comba et al., 2012).

In November 2016, the SENTIERI report was updated with a specific focus on mesothelioma, a disease correlated with the exposure to asbestos. The report concluded that Taranto showed a high incidence of mesothelioma, for both sexes, which were traceable to the local shipyard, steel industry, and cement plant. The exposure was predominately connected to professional reasons (having worked at one of the mentioned industries) but also related to environmental exposure by ordinary citizens residing in Taranto. Further, Vimercati et al. (2016) found high levels of heavy metals in the urine of Taranto residents, concluded that this finding could be related to the local industries and urged institutions to adopt adequate measures. Similar results were reached in a later study (Vimercati et al., 2017).

Meanwhile, the government started to work towards the sale of Ilva to third parties. Several provisions on this matter were included into decree 242/2016. On 5 June 2017 AM InvestCo Italy S.r.l., a joint venture between Arcelor Mittal and the Marcegaglia Group,Footnote 9 won the right to conclude an agreement for the lease and purchase of Ilva. AM InvestCo Italy then presented to the government a new environmental plan, thus exercising the right previously introduced with decree 98/2016. This new plan was annexed to a decree published on 29 September 2017. This decree granted a new deadline for the implementation of the environmental plan, on 23 August 2023.

The analysis: The Italian state-Ilva legal symbiosis and its harmful impact

The previous section showed how the symbiotic relationship (Tombs, 2012) between the Italian state and Ilva has materialized in the law during a seven-year period, and how such a legal symbiosis has created the conditions for harmful corporate practices to continue. The legal symbiosis between the Italian state and Ilva materializes in the law through a specific device, namely the legal category of ‘factory of strategic interest for the nation’. This category is introduced by the state government with decree 207/2012 and it becomes a red thread through all the analyzed legislation. By leveraging on such a label, the state keeps on justifying the introduction of new laws aimed at ensuring the continuation of production, despite increasing evidence of the harm caused by Ilva’s production in Taranto.

Accordingly, the label ‘factory of strategic interest for the nation’ lays the groundwork for a whole “architecture of power” (Whyte, 2014, p. 241) inscribed in the analyzed laws. What follows is a “regime of permissions” (Ibid.) that is reinforced with each new decree that is passed by the government and then converted into law by the parliament. This point shows the relevance of the law in crafting the symbiosis between the Italian state and Ilva. Far from representing unique “moments of rupture” (Ibid.), regulatory failures, or single omissions, the laws analyzed have become a central avenue where the “symbiotic relationship” (Tombs, 2012) between the Italian state and Ilva is entangled. Such an entanglement increases over time, with the new laws building on the previous ones, creating a web of legal provisions that sustains the company’s harmful behavior. In fact, while laws were increasingly passed to legitimize Ilva’s production, evidence of its impact on Taranto’s public health accumulated contextually.

In the Ilva case, the legal symbiosis between the company and the Italian state has taken three main directions. More specifically, the Italian state has facilitated and reproduced Ilva’s harmful behavior by passing laws that have: 1) repeatedly opposed the judiciary’s interventions on Ilva; 2) continuously changed the rules for the implementation of the AIA and the environmental plan; 3) recurrently altered the punishment measures in connection to Ilva’s production. These three types of legal interventions were passed in clear oppositions to the accrued knowledge on Ilva’s impact on Taranto’s public health.

First, the judiciary’s two seizures of Ilva’s property were both based upon evidence of harmful corporate behavior. By legally circumventing the court’s seizures, the state passed laws that went against the tribunal’s precautionary measures to safeguard public health. Second, by continuously changing the rules for the implementation of the AIA and the environmental plan, the state facilitated harmful corporate behaviors. Instead of making the rules for implementation of the AIA more stringent, for instance by setting non-negotiable deadlines or non-amendable fixings, the government repeatedly took the opposite direction and changed the AIA’s implementation always in favor of the company. Third, by introducing multiple provisions on immunity from prosecution, the state created a state of insulation for several subjects connected to Ilva (commissioner and delegates, buyer and lessee), who became shielded from investigation for potential crimes committed while managing the company. The potential impact of this legal provision on public health lies in the fact that immunity from prosecution created one less incentive for these subjects to run Ilva in an environmentally sensible way.

The legal provisions on immunity from prosecution are a relevant avenue to further discuss state-corporate legal symbiosis. Immunity from prosecution clauses are effective instruments for the state to facilitate harmful corporate behaviors that would otherwise be categorized as crimes. If such crimes occur, they will not be prosecutable thanks to the provisions on criminal immunity. These provisions thus become a jewel in the crown of the legal symbiosis between the state and corporations, because they permit the latter to operate without fear of criminal liability. Immunity from prosecution represents a way for the state to render inoperative pre-identified criminal law provisions that would otherwise be applicable.Footnote 10 It produces an exceptional situation as it creates a contingent suspension of the force of law to facilitate otherwise criminal conduct.

Moreover, the previous section contextually presented a large amount of data that demonstrated the degree of social harm done in Taranto, measured in terms of impairments to “the fulfilment of human needs” (Pemberton, 2015, p. 24, italics in the original). This data show that in Taranto there is a widespread diffusion of physical harm, measurable in terms of excesses of mortality, morbidity, and hospitalization, but also impairments to the fulfilment of one’s autonomy (autonomy harms) and identity (relational harm), to use Pemberton’s (2015) typology. This is especially the case if one considers the impact of pollution on Taranto children’s neurodevelopment (Lucchini et al., 2019; Renzetti et al., 2021) and the correlation between socioeconomic factors and mortality in town (Gennaro et al., 2022). Furthermore, several studies showed the impact of industrial pollution on the environment at large and on non-human subjects, such as the local marine life (e.g., Giandomenico et al., 2016).

By presenting a chronological sequence of the laws and epidemiological reports, the previous section showed how the accrued knowledge on Taranto’s public health never led to changes in the law that were at least precautionary for the Taranto’s population. To the contrary, laws took the very opposite direction, always facilitating Ilva’s production despite increasing suspicion of its toxicity for the local population. This point shows how the legal symbiosis between the Italian state and Ilva created the conditions for harmful corporate practices to continue. Harm in Taranto is therefore “socially mediated” (Pemberton, 2015, p. 24), as it is the result of political decisions that are crystallized into the legal framework surrounding Ilva. In this sense, one cannot but read the increasing accumulation of evidence on harm in Taranto as the result of a legal framework that has been conducive to harmful corporate behavior.

Furthermore, in Taranto harm is “socially mediated” (Ibid.) because it is unequally distributed among the local population. Gennaro et al. (2022) show that the mortality rates increase the closer one lives to the industrial area of Taranto, in those neighborhoods that have the lowest socioeconomic conditions in the city. Accordingly, the legal symbiosis between the Italian state and Ilva not only is harmful per se, but it also creates the conditions to reproduce social inequality in Taranto. In fact, immunity from prosecution eliminates the possibility to initiate criminal trials, which are avenues where injured parties can claim compensation for the damages deriving from criminal offences. This is generally a more convenient choice economically than initiating a separate civil lawsuit, because the costs of criminal trials are borne by the state. Immunity from prosecution provisions therefore forecloses one of the possibilities (the cheaper one) for the Taranto residents affected by pollution to seek economic redress.

These are not simple conjectures. The press has reported that public prosecutors have dismissed some investigations on the basis of the provision of decree 1/2015 (see Casula, 2020). Furthermore, 1481 injured parties took part in the trial that ended in 2021, the ‘Processo Ambiente Svenduto’ (Sold-out Environment Trial), which convicted several executives of Ilva for environmental crimes committed until 2013, thus showing a big participation by subjects who have been negatively affected by Ilva’s pollution.

Conclusions

In 2018 the Italian encyclopedia Treccani introduced on its online version the expression ‘Salva-Ilva’ (Save-Ilva), a “provision aimed at preventing the closure of the Ilva factory of Taranto” (“Salva-Ilva”, 2018). Treccani acknowledged an expression that had in fact become frequent in popular and media discourse in Italy. In this article, I showed how Salva-Ilva laws have become an avenue where the “symbiotic relationship” (Tombs, 2012) between the Italian state and Ilva has materialized, and how this legal symbiosis has facilitated harmful corporate practices.

This study has limitations. First, it does not address the multifaceted composition of the state beyond the parliament and government. Future studies can refine this article’s findings by exploring how other state institutions (e.g., courts and regulatory agencies) partake in, or oppose, state-corporate legal symbiosis, and the role of local organizations and the public at large in fighting it.

Furthermore, this study’s analysis is not contextualized within the historical and politico-economic conditions that underpin the legal symbiosis between Ilva and the Italian state. Some research on the Ilva case has already discussed these aspects (see e.g., Barca & Leonardi, 2016; Greco, 2016; Romeo, 2019). This article contributes to this research by showing how the law becomes an instrument that reproduces broader dynamics, e.g., the historical socioeconomic divide between the North and the South of Italy (see Greco, 2016), as well as social inequalities and injustices (see Barca & Leonardi, 2016). To further understand why the legal symbiosis has occurred, one needs a clear picture of the political economy of steel, which would help explain why Ilva has been labeled a ‘factory of strategic interest for the nation’ throughout the analyzed legislation. This research would also help discuss the mutual interplay between law and politics in the production of the socioenvironmental crisis of Taranto.

This study confirms previous findings that discussed the role of the state in preserving Ilva’s production as opposed to safeguarding local health (see Lai et al., 2019), showing the state’s substantial influence in the management of the socioenvironmental crisis for the period 2011-2017. Future research could expand the time scope of this study and discuss state-corporate crime throughout the history of Ilva, following the changes of ownership. This comprehensive study could bring novel inputs to the debates promoted by Greco and Chiarello (2016) on the role of the state in Ilva’s management, and contribute important findings for our theoretical comprehension of state-corporate crime. In this regard, recently the state further expanded the provisions on immunity from prosecution with that decree 2/2023 that led to the demonstration by the Association ‘Genitori Tarantini’ which opened this article. This point proves that while governments change, their approach towards Ilva seems to be remaining consistent.

Finally, this article brings a new case study to the literature on state-corporate crime and social harm, showing how the symbiosis (Tombs, 2012) between the Italian state and Ilva has become a legal symbiosis, which led to a “regime of permissions” (Whyte, 2014, p. 241) that has extended way beyond single moments of legal failures or omissions. This article also contributes to the literature on social harm by showing one example of how the law reproduces harmful corporate practices as well as social inequalities.

Taranto is a city where an awful lot of physical, mental, autonomy, and relational harm (Pemberton, 2015) is done, as proven by a vast amount of epidemiological research. The Italian state has facilitated such a harm to be reproduced, by passing laws that have ensured Ilva’s production to continue, despite evidence of its toxicity. Far from being simply abstract normative statements, these laws have had very real, material effects for the Taranto population, which future research should keep on investigating.

Laws

Decreto del Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri 14 marzo 2014. Decreto del Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri 29 settembre 2017. Decreto legislativo 3 aprile 2006, n. 152. Decreto-legge 3 dicembre 2012, n. 207.

Decreto-legge 4 giugno 2013, n. 61.

Decreto-legge 31 agosto 2013, n. 101.

Decreto-legge 10 dicembre 2013, n. 136.

Decreto-legge 5 gennaio 2015, n.1.

Decreto-legge 4 luglio 2015, n. 92.

Decreto-legge 4 dicembre 2015, n. 191.

Decreto-legge 9 giugno 2016, n. 98.

Decreto-legge 29 dicembre 2016, n. 243.

Decreto-legge 5 gennaio 2023, n. 2.

Legge 24 dicembre 2012, n. 231.

Legge 3 agosto 2013, n. 89.

Legge 30 ottobre 2013, n. 125.

Legge 6 febbraio 2014, n. 6.

Legge 11 agosto 2014, n. 116.

Legge 4 marzo 2015, n. 20.

Legge 6 agosto 2015, n. 132.

Legge 1 febbraio 2016, n. 13.