Territorial Identity and Development The need to prevent losses and promote affirmation of the identity of places and regions in the context of globalized economy and culture gained momentum on development research and policy agendas since the early nineties In the European Union, a major argument has been that the (re)valorization and strengthening of the identity of the peripheral and lagging rural regions is the key to their competitiveness on the global market of goods, services and ideas, and may be decisive for sustainable "local development engineering". However, there has been a growing gap between the pro-identity/development quests and anti-identity/development realities of many places and regions: degradation of environmental, economic, cultural and other identity features have taken place more frequently and at a much larger scale than their effective enhancement. For example, in Portugal, most rural areas have suffered from sharp declines in small-scale agricultural diversity, under-utilisation or abandonment of cultivable land, lack of investments in alternative productive activities, as well as from the continuous weakening of demographic vitality and depletion of endogenous human resources, referred to as "human desertification". Conflicting interests and unequal power-relations between local and global development stakeholders have left marks in land use anarchy and environmental degradation, fading cultural and economic authenticity and arbitrary adoption of the "deterritorialised" identity features. The issue of the (re)affirmation and valorisation of territorial identity has been brought to the pedestal of a panacea for the promotion of local development sustainability in the era of the globalized economy and culture. However, how to determine which identity feature need to be "strengthened", "preserved", "diversified", or made "more competitive", so that it becomes developmentally relevant? Which quanti-qualitative benchmarks to use to monitor and/or evaluate changing territorial identity features in order to appreciate or predict "desirable" from "unwanted" ones in relation to local and/or regional development objectives? And last but not least, who are, or should be, the legitimate guardians of specific identity features, i.e., which institutions or individuals are entitled to cope locally with the (un)favourable forces within the local/global nexus? Such questions are at the core of the conceptual-methodological constraints to the bridging of the gap between the pro-identity discourse and reality. Difficulty in providing answers is best evidenced by the fact that the pro-identity arguments and claims remain, as a rule, confined exclusively to the preambles of development strategies, plans, programmes and projects and are seldom present in their operative sections. In Portugal, the pro-identity rhetoric has had a very prominent place in the introductory section of the National Regional Development Plan 2000-2006, with the argument that "harmony between modernity and tradition means, both territorially and geostrategically, combining the generalised cosmopolitan living patterns with the valorisation of collective identity", but without any follow-up reference to this question in the operative sections of the document. Likewise, National Assemblies of Local Development Agencies continuously have made continuous claims in favour of the "valorisation of cultural identity", "building local self-esteem", "strengthening local diversity", "encouraging community feeling", "mobilising active local citizenship" and "enabling decentralised development" as well as calls for "reaffirmation of local identities in all of its dimensions" in order to "combat exclusion and massification generated by globalisation", but to effectively curtail the process of the economic and cultural descaracterização has not gone beyond interventions, such as conservation of nature, restoration of monuments and revitalization of historic urban nuclei, imposed and/or financed by the European Union. In sum, the preoccupation with the (re)affirmation and valorisation of territorial identities has been increasingly present in the academic and political discourse about the shortfalls of, and prospects for, an increasingly global dependence of the local, regional and national economic and cultural transformation. In the above context, one of the main objectives of TERCUD is to highlight and discuss salient conceptual-methodological questions that can explain the gap between the pro-identity/development discourse and reality and, second, to propose a new conceptual-methodological framework for the study of the relationships between the changing territorial identity and globally conditioned local and regional development.
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Contacts TERCUD - Territory, Culture and Development Research Centre Tel: + 351 21 751 55 00 (Ext: 2267) |