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Since the 1990s, innovation has been recognised as having a key role in the development and competitiveness of European rural territories. In particular, in the LEADER approach, innovation is seen in social and cultural terms rather than as a technological issue, but it has been interpreted by national and, above all, local policies almost exclusively in the latter sense. Especially at local level, often a ‘productivist’ approach emerges that in many cases reveals deeply-rooted conservativeness in the planning and implementation of programmes. Puglia, a NUTS 2 region in southern Italy, acknowledges the key role of innovation in rural development and invested a bigger share of funding in Axes III and IV of Pillar 2 of the Common Agricultural Policy in the 2007-2013 programming cycle than did the other Italian regions. This study examines the regional case in two interconnected stages to identify fi rstly the interpretation of innovation from the programmatic and operative points of view, and secondly, the needs and critical issues in terms of innovation in governance on the local scale through interviews with stakeholders from a representative LAG named ‘Terra dei Messapi’. It reveals not only a marked disparity in the way innovation was interpreted, but also the limitations and critical issues in planning and in regional and local governance, which prove unable to embrace innovation affecting social and institutional processes and, more generally, processes related to the context.

Puglia is the Italian region of the “convergence objective” that has placed the greatest emphasis on the use of the Leader approach in planning for rural development. In view of these aspects, the attempt was made to understand how the Region and the territories comprising the Leader areas interpret innovation. In the case examined, in terms of the capacity to promote and consolidate processes aimed at innovation, there emerge opportunities and constraints linked to structural issues in implementing the policy instrument , to local decisions about strategies and contents, and to the models of governance adopted.

Effetti sui progetti di sviluppo territoriale delle sovrapposizioni tra coalizioni intercomunali.

Local development, inter-municipal cooperation, proximity. The case of Apulia.- The phenomena of organized proximity observed in Puglia show two important aspects: the objectives and strategies do not involve significant discontinuities; the partnerships tend to be relatively stable over time, but they present important (and potentially conflicting) overlappings in space. The forms of organized proximity detected have probably led to a depletion of development projects, but they also increased the availability of local actors to cooperate.