Social Innovation and Human Mobility in Left Behind Areas: Strategies to Cope with Peripherality in Southern Cilento and Viù Valley (Italy)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14422/mig.23832.023Keywords:
social innovation, human mobility, local development, left-behind areas, ItalyAbstract
This paper examines the reciprocal relationship between social innovation and human mobility in two Italian left-behind areas: Southern Cilento (Campania) and Viù Valley (Piedmont). Drawing on 104 in-depth interviews with stakeholders, newcomers, returnees, out-migrants, and long-term residents, it investigates how different mobility patterns interact with locally grounded forms of social innovation. Interviews were analysed through thematic coding, followed by qualitative cross-case and place-based comparison. Findings show that mobility serves as both a catalyst for and a product of social innovation. Mobile actors bring skills, networks and imagination, which stimulate collective learning, organisational experimentation, and the development of cultural events, tourist trails and community infrastructures. These, in turn, generate temporary, circular, and sometimes permanent mobilities. The two cases reveal marked differences in the institutional scaffolding supporting these dynamics. Overall, the analysis reveals that social innovation and mobility co-evolve through their multi-scalar feedback loops, offering pathways for renewal in left-behind areas.
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