The Italian national strategy for inner areas (Snai): A critical analysis of the indicator grid

The National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) is a public policy designed to tackle depopulation in inner areas, defined according to the distance from centers offering essential services. Such a policy’s success is crucial to address the new challenges for planning brought to light by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this sense, there is a need to adequately support its implementation by providing handy decision support tools, understanding the power balances among municipalities, and defining proper interventions. The Indicator Grid, already used by the SNAI for project areas selection, can answer this need. However, the Grid’s application to support public policy at the municipality level requires reviewing some of its features, such as the indicators’ large number and the impossibility of defining some of them at the municipal scale. Based on these premises, this paper aims at supporting inner areas policies by carrying out a critical analysis of the current SNAI Grid, aimed at improving its effectiveness. It relies on a hybrid methodology that merges qualitative data interpretations and statistical analyses. Thanks to this method, defining a parsimonious Grid by leaving its complexity and information level untouched is possible. The sodefined set of indicators can represent a valuable reference tool in pinpointing priorities for actions or selecting further territorial scopes from the SNAI perspective, even if it still brings some criticalities to be faced.