‘Participatory consociationalism? No,but South Tyrol's Autonomy Convention is evidence that power‐sharing can transform conflicts’

South Tyrol is an autonomous, predominantly German‐speaking province in Italy, and one of the most successful cases of power‐sharing in the world. Nevertheless, the Province recently conducted a participatory‐democratic process known as the ‘Autonomy Convention’ to debate and draft a proposal for revising the 1972 Autonomy Statute. It is the first such process with the stated intent of amending a power‐sharing arrangement, and our research questions are whether this represents a new type of consociational negotiation, and what made it possible. The answer to the first question is ‘no’, and the Convention is best seen as a ‘participatory‐ish consultation’ which had no formal power. But the problems that it faced, and the fact that it occurred at all, are evidence of consociational democracy's potential to transform conflicts. The Convention, we argue, is the result of ‘normal’, not ‘ethnic’ politics, and two generations of successful power‐sharing made that possible by desecuritising the relationship between South Tyrol's three official linguistic groups.     

The impact of mining activities on the environment reflected by pollen,charcoal and geochemical analyses

This article presents results of a multi-proxy study of a fen deposit in the former mining district of Falkenstein near Schwaz in the Tyrol, Austria. The aim of the study in the framework of the special research program HiMAT (The History of Mining Activities in the Tyrol and Adjacent Areas – Impact on Environment & Human Societies) was to disclose the ecological impact of mining in pollen and heavy metal diagrams and to create a model combining the changes in palaeoecological proxies with historical evidences for mining. The application of this palaeoecological–historical model to prehistoric times allowed us to reconstruct the impact of mining and metallurgic activities in the surroundings of the fen during the last millennia. The results of stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating, LOI, pollen and micro-charcoal analyses as well as geochemical analyses of scandium, lead and lead isotopes validated by historical and archaeological data are hereby presented.