Last decades have witnessed the rise of the ‘local’ as an increasingly hegemonic dimension within regional development discourses and strategies. Because of its paradigmatic role in the post-Fordist transition, Italy has been regarded as a strategic field for experimentation of cooperative efforts at promoting local and sustainable development, as well as an arena for place-based struggles and conflicts between different geographic scales. Using illustrative empirical material from both win-win and conflict-ridden multi-level planning initiatives, the paper conceptualises the local as a ‘quasi-object’ having the power of mobilising a variety of actors, representations, intellectual technologies and techniques of government and governance, whose achievements demonstrate not to be always consistent with the meanings and the qualitative features that have been originally associated with ‘local’ practices. By drawing upon discourse analysis and Actor-Network theory the paper is intended as an attempt to go beyond the spatial fetishism that is dominant in contemporary local development studies. It does so, firstly, by deconstructing some influential ways of understanding the ‘local’ and, secondly, by exploring its reconstructing power in forging both institutions and actors, objects and subjects of regional development.

Deconstructing and reconstructing the potential of local and regional development strategies and policies: an internal critique / Celata, Filippo; Rossi, U.. - ELETTRONICO. - (2007), pp. 1-23. (Intervento presentato al convegno Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference 2007 tenutosi a Londra nel 29-31 Agosto 2007).

Deconstructing and reconstructing the potential of local and regional development strategies and policies: an internal critique.

CELATA, Filippo;
2007

Abstract

Last decades have witnessed the rise of the ‘local’ as an increasingly hegemonic dimension within regional development discourses and strategies. Because of its paradigmatic role in the post-Fordist transition, Italy has been regarded as a strategic field for experimentation of cooperative efforts at promoting local and sustainable development, as well as an arena for place-based struggles and conflicts between different geographic scales. Using illustrative empirical material from both win-win and conflict-ridden multi-level planning initiatives, the paper conceptualises the local as a ‘quasi-object’ having the power of mobilising a variety of actors, representations, intellectual technologies and techniques of government and governance, whose achievements demonstrate not to be always consistent with the meanings and the qualitative features that have been originally associated with ‘local’ practices. By drawing upon discourse analysis and Actor-Network theory the paper is intended as an attempt to go beyond the spatial fetishism that is dominant in contemporary local development studies. It does so, firstly, by deconstructing some influential ways of understanding the ‘local’ and, secondly, by exploring its reconstructing power in forging both institutions and actors, objects and subjects of regional development.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11573/57950
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