Italy Testing the Place-Based Approach: River Agreements and National Strategy for Inner Areas

Territorial imbalances between catalysts of development and lagging areas are raising concerns in the majority of European regions. The divide between main urban nodes and marginal territories poses serious development challenges. The polarization of social, economic and cultural opportunities in urban areas and the phenomena of ageing, depopulation and impoverishment of inner areas are often the result of place-neutral, spatially-blind approaches to development, and constitute a hurdle towards the European objective of social, economic and territorial cohesion. In order to face these challenges, since a decade the European Union is pushing towards more place-based approaches to development, combining bottom-up and top-down logic within multilevel, multiactor and multifund context-sensitive processes. The experiences of the River Agreements and the National Strategy for Inner Areas represents interesting examples of the Italian take on the EU place-based logics, aiming at reversing the negative development trends that characterize the country’s marginal areas. Despite each presenting its own peculiarities, the two approaches share some common ground, as they both attempt to develop innovative, place-sensitive governance processes, featuring a participatory dimension and aiming at overcoming administrative and sectoral boundaries. This contribution discusses the potentials and limitations of the two approaches, with particular attention for the place-based flavour of the peculiar multilevel governance frameworks they adopt. The presented findings constitute an input to the debate on policies for the reactivation of marginal areas and the rebalance of territorial inequalities in a sustainable perspective.