Relaunch of Italy’s inner areas and community cooperatives: the – failed – case of Gerfalco

A few years ago, in Italy, after many years of inattention towards rural and mountain areas and towards all those territories considered marginal and unproductive.there was a return to the debate on how to try to relaunch the country’s so-called ‘inner areas’, These territories – that occupy more than 50% of the Italian surface – are geographically complex and socially disadvantaged, due to a plurality of dynamics that have made them poor from a demographic and economic point of view and inadequate in terms of available services. Although in some phases of the industrialisation process there have been attempts to bring factories and extend the productivist model to these areas – almost always unsuccessfully even from an environmental point of view – from a certain point onwards these territories have been left to their own devices despite their wealth of natural and cultural resources. These dynamics (processes of urbanisation, tertiarization of the economy and a crisis in traditional agriculture) have contributed to exacerbating inequalities between the Italian territories, which in the ‘inner areas’ are expressed through a high degree of social exclusion, absence of essential services and distancing from the governance bodies of the territory and of its resources. However, a combination of factors – such as rising unemployment, the high cost of living in cities, the ecological crisis of urban centres, together with a cultural change and an attempt to re-evaluate natural resources long considered unproductive – have timidly put the spotlight back on inner areas. This academic and political attention towards inner areas nowadays needs to place social justice side by side with the recently conceptualised principle of environmental justice – defined as the idea that the global population should have equal access to and equal control over the environmental resources necessary for their subsistence and well-being (water, land, energy, and clean air). From a policy point of view, among the various actions undertaken to make inner areas attractive again and to achieve greater environmental justice in these contexts, one of the most interesting is the establishment, and then the growth, of so-called ‘community cooperatives’. This is a particular type of social enterprise that seeks to strengthen the link between the typically cooperative model and the territory and the people who live there. As the name suggests, these enterprises work when they can count on a ‘community’ reference that believes in the territory in which it lives and seeks to halt the process of depopulation by making the territory attractive again. In the first chapter we explore the concept of ‘inner area’ and we analyse the National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI); successively, the second chapter is dedicated to community cooperatives, with particular attention to the Tuscany Region , where a case study analysis was conducted, which will be discussed in the third chapter. The final part of the article presents the results of research conducted in Gerfalco where, since 2017, old, but above all, new residents have tried to set up a community cooperative. Through a documentary analysis and a series of interviews both with the protagonists of this project and with other residents who remained indifferent to it, the difficulties encountered and the reasons why the cooperative was not established will be described. The purpose of this article is to underline the importance of social and human capital in the national and international debate on rural development. In fact, rural decline is frequently explained in economic terms by unfavourable conditions and by a lack of resources or support. But this link is not entirely clear and does not give enough 2 consideration to the role of social capital, particularly in terms of community bonds and social ties. This paper aims at placing communitarian bonds and community participation at the core of rural development processes, highlighting their fundamental role both in the implementation of rural development policies and in bottom-up attempts to revitalise so-called marginal areas. This will be done through the description of a failed attempt to constitute a ‘community cooperative’, which – as will be described – is considered a hybrid enterprise model which places itself in between a social enterprise tout court (of which it constitutes a sub-group), and a traditional consumer cooperative.