Institutional Arrangements and Political Mobilization in the New Italian Regionalism: The Role of Spatial Policies in the Piedmont Region

Abstract

The paper focuses on the resurgence of the regions as protagonists of the process of the state rescaling in many European countries. In the EU countries this process can be seen as a result of a mix of economic and institutional factors, which have been producing an increasing competition between the central governments and the regional authorities. The rise of the multi-level governance and of the so-called Euroregionalism has reinforced the role of the regional scale in the territorial development: on one hand, with new actors like agencies and organizations engaged in the economic development (FDI attraction, place marketing, innovation and learning), on the other hand by the resurgence of “old” actors, such as the regions, in many cases empowered by processes of institutional devolution. The literature has investigated this re-composition of the political space with regard to the “hollowing out” and the “rescaling” of the state. On the base of these theoretical underpinnings, we discuss some empirical evidence from the Italian experience, in order to show whether and how the regional structures are not only “spaces for policies”, but also “spaces for politics”. Over the last decade, the changes in legal framework, the external inputs from supranational levels of government—the European Commission—and the re-territorialization processes have introduced many elements of innovation in the role of the regions. By illustrating the case of the Piedmont Region, we try to demonstrate that the transition towards the region as an active space of politics can be mediated by the sphere of the policies, especially the spatial ones.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jussi Jauhiainen for his helpful comments and to the two anonymous reviewers for their stimulating and enriching remarks.

Notes

^†An earlier version of this paper was presented to ACSP-AESOP, 4th Joint Congress, 6–11 July 2008, Chicago, IL.

Some go even further, declaring the apparently dangerous ambiguity of the term local development and the practices that characterize it:

• Local development would therefore appear to be an antinomic expression for a whole series of interrelated reasons. In the first place, development is the result of an economic process that is neither local, nor regional and not even national (although the nation-State was the main player), but fundamentally a world-wide phenomenon (especially in the era in which we live). It is clear that, even if increasingly deterritorialised, the international process is taking place in a spatial context. World development is a sum of transformations, or initiatives, occurring locally, but logic of the process is firstly a global, and hence, a spatial phenomenon. Policies have less and less power over the process itself, and their control over its territorial positioning is extremely limited. (Latouche, 2005, pp. 42–43)

An emblematic example is the success of the concept of “social capital”: since any kind of “capital” has a social matrix, it is controversial that a high endowment of “social capital” goes along with the endogenous economic growth: as Hadjimichalis points out, in this case one takes the correlation as a causation nexus. Otherwise, social capital is not always an indicator of a society based on cooperation and reciprocity: the embeddedness of organized crime such as the various regional mafias seems to attest to kinds of collusive social capital, oriented to keep the status quo and the social marginality as a fertile land for their self-reproduction (Trigilia, 2002).

Decree No 122, 31 March 1998.

Law No. 59, 15 March 1998.

The Italian Nord-Ovest (North-West) is a cultural and political “unitary” frame for a geographically differentiated mix of industrialized regions, such as Piedmont, Liguria and Lombardy, which have been historically opposed to the “underdeveloped South” (the Mezzogiorno). This dualistic perspective has been undermined by the “discovery” of a third geographical component, the geographical spaces of industrial districts in the so-called Terza Italia, which, however, are not exclusive of the latter (Bagnasco, 1977) The image of Nord-Ovest or, even, of the Nord as a whole, has been recently recovered by a number of regional and local actors who, in different fields (scholarship, public government, economy), argue the renaissance of the Italian economic engine with new, post and neo-industrial features (Berta, 2007; CiSS, 2007).