Conclusions
To sum up, human development within a local perspective can be seen as ‘a process that integrates economic, cultural and social policies, harmonizing economic and social development' (Canzanelli, 2001, p.
23), where the following objectives are comprehensively pursued:• Enabling marginalized social groups to participate fully and productively in the territorial economy and society;
• Expanding local work opportunities and productivity;
• Fostering sustainable industrial trajectories based on endogenous potentialities and local entrepreneurship;
• Protecting and valorizing the environment and its resources;
• Promoting access for all to education, information, technology and know-how as essential means for enhancing social and economic upgrading;
• Ensuring social justice and equity through equal opportunities to access resources and services;
• Strengthening the capacity of men, women and children to participate in the civil, political, economic, social and cultural life of the territory.
Therefore, the process of creating and sustaining an enabling environment for human flourishing is fundamentally embedded in the local realm of polity, politics and policy, within an evolutionary territorial dynamics.
Having embraced a holistic, progressive and sustainable normative view of local development (Pike et al., 2007) based on the CA and the pillars of SHD, some key issues emerge for discussion: how is it possible to operationalize the notion of Sustainable Human Development at the local level? How is it possible to represent the dynamic processes of capability expansion within a similar perspective? Which feedback loops sustain the evolutionary territorial dynamics of the enabling (or disabling) factors behind human development?
In order to provide consistent answers and arguments for future discussion, it is essential to open the “black-box”, that is, to disentangle the combination of different elements (stakeholders, resources, barriers, institutions, capacities, political spaces and willingness) that shape how conversion factors are produced and how they govern the evolution of territorial development patterns. Taking into account the need for systematic comparative analysis between different case studies in order to identify similar placebased patterns of capability expansion and the enhancement of individual and social empowerment, it is necessary to rely on an analytical framework that is able to explore the procedural dynamics of human development avoiding fragmented, sectoral and static perspectives based on “desiccated indicators” (Morgan, 2004, p. 884).