Ricordarsi un futuro. Società locale e partecipazione allo sviluppo in Alta Irpinia

REMEMBERING A FUTURE Local society and participation in development actions in Alta Irpinia The research focuses on local development strategies, emerging in five little tows of East Irpinia, a peripheral area in Southern Italy. The concept of local development adopted in this work is not only economic: actually, it implies economic growth, but only as a component of a process that must also bring social, cultural and human growth for local societies. Irpinian people come from decades of economic, social and political dependence from distant deci-sion-making arenas. They are living a history of chronic and severe economic crisis and depopulation, at least from 1950s. They have faced several natural disasters, such as the 1980 earthquake, with all the related economic and po-litical consequences: the construction industry doped the local economy for nearly two decades; then came the automotive industry (in neighboring Melfi), which subjected the area to the fluctuations of that specific market, still depending on events and decisions that have been taking place far away. Finally, in the last ten years, the area is becoming a location of intensive ex-traction of natural resources (namely wind power and, possibly, hydrocar-bons). All these processes are not locally controlled. In opposition to all these difficulties, in the last twenty years another way of thinking local development emerged: a way that aims at promoting the local resources (both touristic and rural), and highlighting their value on the bigger scale of globalized markets: in this vision, winning a remarkable position in the competition game between territories is the main way to take back an au-tonomy capability in local development. Endogenous resources and their promotion can be locally controlled. That is why this promotion is gradually spreading in several initiatives: museums of local cultures, restoration of his-toric places, new productions based on local peculiarities, and so on. This process has to face considerable challenges. On the one side, the prob-lems of local governance characterizing these: many local development initia-tives that flourished recently have been uncoordinated, therefore unable to build an actual system to properly support the local development strategy. On the other side, the organized civil society looks very fragile, so that it cannot work as an asset to strengthen all these initiatives. For such reasons, an active participation by the local society in these processes becomes vital: the indi-vidual initiatives alone (and their few promoters) will not produce durable outcomes, if the local social environment is not favourable; or, in other words, if a fovourable social capital will not emerge. Signals are unclear: there have been moments of wide participation, regardless the organized level of civil society; but there have been moments of general indifference and apathy, too. This research focuses on how local society relates itself to the strategies of lo-cal development, and their related actions. How local society elaborates the representations at the core of these strategies? How activism can flourish? How can it endure? To address these questions, it is considered here relevant to understand the way local society organizes, differentiates and manages conflicts; and how it relates with what is perceived as “the outside”. The mak-ing of boundaries influences the opportunities of collective action, and is re-lated to power relations (especially in the frame of statehood rescaling pro-cesses), affecting local development strategies. So, to sum up, the main ques-tion is how the local society imagines itself and its own future path. This research adopts an interpretative approach. For two years, the author spent on field three intervals of several months, conducting ethnographic re-search by overt participant observation. Main actors of the local development strategies were interviewed as well. A comparative analysis was conducted between the Irpinian case study, and two other similar Italian locations, in-volved in local development actions.