Place-based policy and politics

Headnote

Neoliberal 'space-blind' policy-making has failed; place-based policy-making must give power to local communities and destabilise the status quo in order to allow communities to escape from under-development traps. Unorthodox thinking and lessons from Italy's Inner Areas Strategy suggest how this can be done.

One of the tenets of the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s was that policymaking should be 'space-blind':1 economic and social inequalities among places would eventually even out through market forces (that is, the mobility of people and the spreading of innovation); public investments should follow the location decisions of corporations, which would ultimately benefit everybody; institutional reforms should spread 'best practices' designed independently of particular places. Anger over increased regional inequalities and the manifestation of this anger at the polls is now alerting economic and political elites to the importance of place in policy-making. Back in 2017, explicitly referring to 'voters for Brexit and Mr Trump', The Economist argued that 'unless policymakers grapple seriously with the problem of regional inequality, the fury of those voters will only increase ... Assuaging the anger of the left-behind means realising that places matter too'.2

But what exactly is a place-based approach? How does it differ from traditional development policies? What does it imply for traditional sectoral policies? And for the role of citizens within democracy? And finally, can it really help turn anger away from fuelling an authoritarian dynamic and create a dynamic of social, economic and political emancipation? In this article I will address these questions by drawing from an available body of theory and practice and from a country-wide strategy in Italian inner areas.

The context: interpersonal and territorial inequalities

Everything starts with high - and often rising - levels of inequality. The facts about economic inequalities are clear-cut. Interpersonal inequalities in terms of income have stopped decreasing in the last thirty years within all western countries, while world-wide between-countries income inequality has been decreasing, due to the rise in non-western countries of a new middle class.3 At the same time, wealth inequality has significantly increased. This rise in economic inequality is unevenly geographically distributed: a divide has been opening between successful and declining areas. Regional economic inequalities have risen.4

Social inequalities, defined as inequalities in access to, and the quality of,...