How can bottom-up, collaborative practices innovate landscape management and governance processes at local level? Some empirical evidences and a case study from Italy

Landscape, as a common good, needs different forms of intervention and management, calling for social responsibility interplaying with policy support and expertise advocacy. This paper aims to discuss collective action approaches for agro-environmental and landscape management, within contexts of intensifying rural-urban interaction. It explores the enhancing role of civic society, community mobilisation and organisation in promoting innovative initiatives. They seem to be able to provide (new) common goods and services (such as landscape/environmental preservation) but also to enrich landscape practices of social and ethical implications, as offering immaterial and relational goods, improving identity and community building and creating civic welfare spaces. The focus will be put on the emerging grassroots practices of land or landscape stewardship, red on two interpretative levels: 1) as opportunities to redefine some collective action frames in order to use, (re)produce and manage common goods in collaborative, participated and proactive way; 2) as laboratories for finding alternative patterns for local governance, moving out of the classic public-private dichotomy, towards a collective perspective.