Innovazione sociale e istituzionalizzazione: l’esempio delle cooperative di comunità nell’area interna dell’Appennino Emiliano

In the last decades, peripheral areas have faced progressive processes of depopulation and marginalization, which have often resulted in a growing difficulty for the remaining inhabitants to access essential services, such as education, health and transports. If, on the one hand, public policies in Italy have started to consider these areas as crucial (see the Na- tional Strategy for Inner Areas, SNAI), on the other hand, local communities have spontaneously engaged in bottom-up initiatives, which deserve great attention. In this contribution, we will analyse the case of SNAI’s inner area “Appennino Emiliano”, where so-called “community enterprises” have been active since the 90s, questioning whether they could indeed constitute an adequate answer to the emerging issues affecting inner/peripheral areas, and be an example of community-led innovation that is able to integrate its actions in the scope of a formal, state-led production of local development strategies.