Affirmation of territorial identity: A development policy issue

The quests for the (re)affirmation of the identity of places and regions in the era of globalised economy and culture gained momentum on local and regional development research and policy agendas since the early nineties. However, there has been a gap between the pro-identity/development discourse and reality, especially in some rural areas of the peripheral and lagging European regions and countries, such as Portugal, marked by land use anarchy, environmental degradation, loss of cultural authenticity, etc., as well as by the asymmetrical interests and power-relations between local and global development stakeholders. The gap between the pro-identity discourse and reality could be overcome if “territorial identity”, basically an ambiguous and inoperative concept, would be transformed into an analytical category, susceptible to measurement, monitoring and evaluation. It is argued in this paper that territorial identity features can be studied empirically if conceptualised as sets of spatially anchored contents of natural and cultural landscape features (“spatial fixes”) that are associated with activities, relations and meanings within horizontal and vertical networks and systems that determine lifestyle features (“spatial flows”) in a given geographical area. To this end, a new conceptual-methodological framework, the IDENTERRA Model, is proposed. Its application, based on macroscopically established evidence and fieldwork records of the changing identity features, could lay grounds for a greater synergy between the pro-identity quests and their operationalisation in development policies and instruments.