Distretti industriali italiani in cambiamento e place leadership

The challenges faced by traditional manufacturing territories in the Italian regions, and in other countries with developed economies, have been characterized in the last two decades by an acceleration and increasing levels of complexity. This paper proposes a reflection between the concept of place leadership (PL), recently introduced in an international strand of regional studies, and a set of cases of Italian industrial districts. The concept of PL allows to re-introduce the strategic dimension of agency in the study of local/regional paths of economic development. The PL has the function of giving a unitary and coordinated orientation to processes of territorial governance, in particular within phases of change of development paths that can have multiple outcomes. In this paper, the adjustment phase of the development paths of a set of important Italian industrial districts is explored by looking at both different types of PL and their relationship with territorial governance.