Politiche industriali per i distretti, politiche di sviluppo ispirate dai distretti. La lezione di Sebastiano Brusco

This paper will discuss two fundamental concepts of industrial policy devel-oped by Sebastiano Brusco: the role of real services to support district firms and the role of real services needed to transform groups of isolated firms into systems of firms; and the promotion of widespread changes at the level of knowledge, competences, and social relations. These concepts emphasize both that industrial policies centred on real services can treat the industrial district per se as a key policy target and that local development policies should use the concept of the industrial district as a reference model to iden-tify innovative approaches to policy design and intervention more generally. Thus, when policy making used district planning contracts as a form of support for territorial policies in Southern Italy, the industrial districts themselves became actors of policy making on a national scale. This paper explores this conceptual shift and briefly outlines some changes in the paradigm of research and in the policy framework of the last decade.