The applicability of the indicators proposed by the European and national regulatory framework for the verification of the advancement of the plans: the case of the Energy and Environmental Masterplan of the Sicilian Region.

Indicators are essential operational tools for the preparation of plans, to monitor their progress and for the ex-post verification of the results achieved. As it is known, there is a large corpus of indicators, both at Community and national Italian level, to which designers and planners can refer. However, it remains to verify the effectiveness of general validity parameters in describing the progress of the implementation of plans, which must be necessarily compared with more limited territorial situations. This paper addresses this problem, with reference to the Energy and Environmental Plan of the Sicilian Region (PEARS), comparing the themes proposed at European (Eurostat) and the Italian national (ISPRA) levels with those adopted for the preparation of PEARS. The instrument here used for verification is just composed by the indicators (Headlines) present in the Eurostat topics, of which the actual applicability at regional level has been monitored in order of verifying the degree of achievement of the objectives proposed by PEARS. The comparison shows the not perfect usability of the top-down scheme, for the singling out of the indicators, which must be rather declined in greater detail, according to a bottom-up scheme of intervention, that is able to understand with the suitable specificity the needs of the area under examination.