Territorial Vocation and Territorial Governance: A Situationist Point of View. The Case of Manfredonia Area.

The concepts of ‘territorial vocation’ and ‘territorial governance’ are focal in the literature of tourism management. These same concepts are also the link with many other research fields such as territorial marketing and local economic development. The paper aims to contribute to the debate on territorial vocation and territorial governance processes by giving an alternative vision, called ‘situationist’, compared to the prevailing one, defined as ‘systemic’. In the traditional paradigm territory is represented as a pre-determined system with respect to the local actors and coalitions. In this epistemological framework the ‘territorial vocation’ appears as an objective character, self-evident, expression and synthesis of the potential of resources, skills and capacities of a territory. Sharing this approach, the strategic goal in tourism management is to design, implement and control a mechanism of local planning that integrates the local community in the common goal of sustainable development of the territory. In a ‘situationist’ point of view territory is a concrete system constructed by the actors. This different paradigm qualifies the territory as a space of games, a place of different interests and strategies, a place of interaction, negotiation and conflict among actors and their coalitions. The territorial vocation becomes a rationalized myth, an intersubjective construct, not assisted by an aura of objectivity and functionality to the interests of territory. It is the result, influenced by unintended effects, of the strategic action of a pro-tempore dominant coalition. The situationist perspective into the territorial governance processes is far from simplistic predictive models. It also debunks models of strategic management and place marketing and proposes the winding road of exploration of the strategies - cooperative and conflictual - enacted by actors and / or local coalitions to pursue their interests. The paper presents the case of the concrete dynamics of territorial governance of Manfredonia (Foggia, Italy) and its oscillation between touristic and industrial vocation in the light of the processes of action and institutionalization.