Landscape regeneration and place-based development in marginal areas: learning from an Integrated Project in Southern Salento

This paper aims to contribute to the debate on improving the capacity of place-based policies to trigger sustainable development strategies in marginal rural areas. Drawing on a critical review of the literature on rural development planning, with a focus on European and Italian policies and multi-actor and multi-level approaches in the design and implementation of place-based policies, the paper discusses a participatory action-research experience carried out by the authors, which concerns an Integrated Project for landscape regeneration and local development in Southern Salento, Italy. This is a rural area that adds to the typical features of a peripheral context those related to the so-called Olive Quick Decline Syndrome, a disaster connected to the Xylella epidemic, which transformed a huge part of the traditional landscape of olive groves into a ghostlike place, thus worsening local process of land abandonment and marginality. In this context of social, ecological and economic crisis, the Integrated Project adopted an evolutionary approach to resilience combined with a relational conception of territory-landscape. This was aimed to provide a transformative and empowering local agenda, challenging local actors (and researchers) to experiment with an evolutionary transition towards a more sustainable rural development. According to this perspective, the Integrated Project took the distance from mere consultation-based forms of participation to encompass the selective mobilisation of local actors engaged in collective transformative practices. Thus, it gives some methodological indications on how to develop multilevel governance arrangements to promote new knowledge and innovative ideas for a transformative development of places, which is still a poorly articulated issue in place-based documents and literature. A reflection on the findings of this experience may thus give interesting suggestions for future public policies supporting place-based development in marginal territories.