The Special Commissioner for Major Works: from emergency measure to strategic lever to attract capital for major infrastructure
In 2025, Italia's programme of strategic and priority infrastructures is worth 522 billion euro, with 174 billion in works in progress, over 75 billion already completed and almost 190 billion still in planning. Of these, 210 billion concern commissioned works or works included in the PNRR-PNC, with a financial coverage of around 67%. This is a critical mass that coincides with the final implementation phase of the Plan and the structural start of the country's energy and logistics transition, and which will certainly affect the current year. In this context, the issue in 2026 is no longer just about speeding up: it is about governing complexity through a single decision-making centre.
In recent years, the extraordinary commissioner has been described as the symptom of an administrative system incapable of functioning according to ordinary rules. This is a reductive reading. In large infrastructures - HS/HC lines, railway junctions, ports, dams, reservoirs, strategic water interventions - the concentration of responsibility is not a pathological deviation, but an organisational response to the structural fragmentation of competences, the plurality of opinions, the overlapping of levels of government and the physiological exposure to litigation. The experience of the commissioners for the railway sections of the PNRR, for the Foranea di Genova dam or for the Peschiera water system enhancement shows that unitary direction reduces the time required between design, authorisation and construction site, without suspending controls but making them sequential, traceable and accountable.
The crux, therefore, is not whether to commission or not. The crux is how to transform commissionership from an emergency instrument into a permanent institutional infrastructure. Today, appointment is by Prime Ministerial Decree, with delimited and temporally circumscribed derogatory powers. Tomorrow, in an international context in which competition to attract infrastructure capital is increasingly intense, a stable governance model is needed: a public body with full responsibility for the entire cycle of the work, with effective powers of inter-institutional coordination, certain mechanisms for overcoming qualified disagreements and stringent digital monitoring and reporting obligations.
For institutional investors, the decisive variable is not the formal breadth of powers, but the predictability of the decision-making process. An infrastructure fund or an industrial operator evaluating a railway, energy or water project financing does not fear the presence of a single decision-maker; it fears, rather, the multiplication of veto centres, the uncertainty of authorisation schedules, the variability of service conferences, and the possibility of blockages occurring. In this sense, the real risk for the Italia system is not concentrated excess power, but decision fragmentation. It is the dispersion of competences that generates implicit costs, time dilation, serial litigation and continuous revision of economic frameworks.
The PNRR season offered a laboratory of method: binding milestones, stringent timetables, nominal responsibility of implementing actors, digital monitoring platforms. Transferring what has worked into the ordinary regime means institutionalising the commissioner as a public project leader, not as an episodic exception. This requires a rigorous selection of truly strategic works, robust and comparable ex ante evaluations, full integration with the Strategic Infrastructure Planning Document required by the new Public Contracts Code, and a clear delimitation of administrative and accounting responsibilities.
