Learning in/from peripherality: The agency of municipal institutions through governance and welfare restructuring in Inner Areas

Geographically uneven development represents a significantly complex challenge to the sustainable and just transition of peripheral places and regions. Several grand societal challenges and uneven development outcomes have long affected peripheral places, and continue hampering opportunities for pathbreaking and path creation. Peripheral areas nonetheless have experienced a wide array of resistance practices that experiment with initiatives and themes around housing, employment, and services. Munici-pal public administrations play a pivotal role in these, arising from their administrative function, their symbolic representation of democracy and public interest, and their em-bodiment of a sense of responsibility towards community wellbeing. While no con-sensus emerges in Economic Geography (EG) around the definition, role, and func-tioning of institutions (including their evolution and change), existing interpretations and operationalisations often consist in vague conceptualisations, or relegate them to a more ‘passive’ role on the regulation or incentivisation of economic activities. On the other hand, I argue institutional agency in uneven development contexts to be trans-formative in nature, i.e., acting as a catalyst for pathbreaking and path creation towards more sustainable and just futures. This perspective aligns with calls in EG for a more relational and agency-based perspective on path creation. Micro-scale analyses of transformative agency are need-ed, to provide highly territorialised insights on specific actors (possibly based on their own perspective), and on how their actions are meaningfully and purposefully directed towards spatial justice. This is especially relevant for welfare and services in areas affected by geographically uneven development outcomes, as the resulting arrange-ments to organise and govern provision systems often also entail a restructuring of institutions — e.g., through remunicipalisations and intermunicipalisation of welfare and services, and multi-actor, community-based forms. However, transformative insti-tutional agency faces several obstacles related to both structural constraints and agentic dynamics. Some of these are well-known in policy and academia, such as the lack of human resources; the thinness, low differentiation, and/or uneven distribution of ac-tors; and the scarcity of financial budgets to design and implement projects and initia-tives. Others are more covert and complex, and require in-depth investigations of insti-tutional agency: the presence of organisational and socio-cognitive challenges that hamper alignment, cooperation, and the establishment of intermunicipal forms of col-lective agency; the asymmetry of power relations with higher-level administrative ac-tors and policy-/decision-makers; and a somehow internalised ‘haemorrhagic narra-tive’ of depopulation and decline, which has only recently been contested and re-framed thanks to the action of place-based leaders and local communities. Based on the centrality of institutions in local and regional development processes, on the agency they embed and exercise for pathbreaking and path creation, and on their constraints and obstacles, the following research investigates the role of munici-pal institutions (i.e., municipal public administrations) in local and regional develop-ment processes that aim at transforming peripheral territories towards sustainable and spatially just futures. The research is centred around the questions of how municipal institutions in peripherality contexts make sense of, embody, frame, and negotiate pe-ripherality, uneven development processes, and transformative resilience, to then ask how these institutions legitimise local and regional development policy and other spe-cific actions and strategies implemented at the local level. The whole research project is based on an in-depth, mixed-methods analysis of a case study in the Gran Sasso – Valle Subequana Inner Area in the Abruzzo Region, Italy, whose transformative insti-tutional agency was analysed by multiple perspectives around depopulation, welfare and services, and intermunicipal governance. The abundance of primary data, especial-ly interviews with mayors and technical officers, allowed a grounded, systematic, ex-periential, and territorialised interpretation of the strategies, rationales, meanings, ac-tions, and consequences of institutional agency in peripheral areas. Cartographic and infographic representations, (non-)participant observation, mapping, fieldnotes, and informal interactions further corroborated the interpretation of results. In the first chapter, I identify such preconditions and barriers as evidence of trans-formational failures. I reconstruct their historical evolution for the Inner Area, and de-scribe the consequences of these failures and the strategies implemented to address them. I then analyse municipal welfare provision and access to proximity services, mapping their uneven distribution in terms of presence, diversity, and distance, to in-terpret their impact on current and future habitability conditions. Building upon these high-resolution information, I then analyse municipal institutional capacity to influence or improve accessibility to several types of services. What emerges from the three chapters is a ‘withered agency’ of municipal institutions, derived both from the historical unfolding of uneven development processes (e.g., post-WWII de-industrialisation and privatisations), and from a ‘paradox of the local,’ where the institution closest to territorial specificities and communities is also the least powerful to influence policies and decisions taken at higher governance levels.