L’Alta Irpinia tra progetti di sviluppo e identità territoriale

The article aims to investigate, in a traditional internal area of the Campania Apennines, the potential relationship between the reinforcement of local identity and the activated development of projects. After a brief theoretical-conceptual framework regarding endogenous development, internal areas and territorial identity, we move on to analyze Alta Irpinia as a project area. An overview of the main initiatives implemented since the 1990s is matched with the perspectives opened by the recent Pilot Project of the National Strategy for Inland Areas. In the light of the choice of Alta Irpinia, as a prototype of a new – explicitly place-based – strategy, we discuss the forms of endogenous development, the problematic use of the category of «identity» in project tools, and the contradictions emerging from the proposed rescaling hypotheses. In the concluding reflections we examine some critical nodes of the relationship between external inputs, forms of involvement of local actors in the project and the possible reinforcement of otherwise weak and rarefied identities in the context of an internal and marginal area of the Italian Mezzogiorno.