The National Strategy for Inner Areas: Innovation, Policy Transfer and Post-Earthquake Reconstruction

This article analyses the Italian National Strategy for Inner Areas (NSIA) as a new policy for local development only partially linked to the European cohesion policy. It focuses on its innovative contents (vision, governance and methodology), and mainly on the transfer of innovation to lower levels of government and between local administrations. As an empirical study of policy transfer and policy innovation in a system of multilevel governance it shows an unexpected transfer of the NSIA methodology to another policy field: that of post-earthquake reconstruction in Central Italy. The article concludes by applying the typology of policy transfer developed in its first part to the analysis of the case-study as a whole.