Comparing Rural Livelihood Transitions in the Catalan and Sardinia Regions of Europe and the Appalachian Region of the United States

This chapter draws from comparative research on the role of regional governance and policy in reimagining rural livelihoods after deindustrialization in three regions, two of which – Sardinia and Appalachia -- are very marginalized within their national contexts; the three examples show the results of very different levels of public investment in rural livelihoods after deindustrialization. Domenica Farinella and Ann Kingsolver have been collaborating in an ongoing comparative research project between Sardinia, Italy, and Appalachian Kentucky in the US, which both have a long-term history with extractive industries and are transitioning to more locally integrated and sustainable regional economies. Ismael Vaccaro and his collaborator Oriol Beltran joined the comparison in 2014 because of similarities in conditions of deindustrialization in the three mountain regions; in the Catalan section of the Pyrenees, however, there is not quite the same level of economic precarity as in the other two regions. We include it as an example of what strategies are possible with more capitalization and state support (although the recent burst of the housing “bubble” led to some disinvestment in sustainable regional development initiatives in the Pyrenees). Residents of all three re-peripheralized regions have been attempting to organize agricultural diversity and strong regional linkages for developing agritourism and ecotourism. Our research methods have included discourse analysis, analysis of aggregate data, and qualitative interviewing. Territorial organization of the economy is strongest in the Pyrenees with a recent history, anyway, of national and regional governmental support, and secondly in Sardinia, where EU policies support, however problematically, a regional approach to sustainable development; in Appalachia, there is little coordination between relatively small county-level political and economic entitities and little state-level support for development that is focused on regionally integrated economies.