An interview with Renzo Macelloni, Mayor of Peccioli, on balancing ambitious sustainability goals with community needs while preserving the territory’s identity.
How can we balance ambitious sustainability goals with the tangible, everyday needs of a community?
We put these questions to Renzo Macelloni, Mayor of Peccioli, who offers a frank and grounded perspective on participatory governance and ecological transition.
For Macelloni, meaningful participation starts with a concrete project. Administrators must first study the issues, develop a clear vision, and then engage citizens around it. Creating participation spaces simply to ask people what they want, without a project to anchor the conversation, risks producing fragmented input that doesn’t move things forward.
On ecological transition and social justice, Macelloni challenges the idea of vulnerability as something affecting only specific groups: environmental issues concern everyone, and must be framed as a common good rather than as niche concerns. The environment, he argues, is a broad and expansive concept — one that brings together all the elements that make a place livable and healthy.
When it comes to the alignment between national strategies and local realities, Macelloni is direct: it is complicated. Science must be applied socially, and hard deadlines, if imposed without considering the social cost, can generate more damage than benefit. When people see their future disappear, he warns, they stop worrying about CO2 and start voting out of anger — and anger is not the best advisor.
Watch the full interview below.
Last Update
24/07/2026
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