Contratti di Rete for the Tourism Development of a Mountain Area. The Experience of Sila Plateau in a Southern Region of Italy

The purpose of this paper is to consider the development of tourism business networks focusing on an Italian regulatory tool, the Contratto di Rete (Contract of Network), aimed at promoting stable cooperation among entrepreneurs. This instrument formalizes the “relational” characters of social capital, strengthening face-to-face relationships between the actors (Negrelli and Pacetti, 2016) and potentially produces positive externalities that can favour tourism development facilitating the adoption of a unitary and integrated territorial governance system.The paper is made up of two main parts. Following the analysis of the characteristics of this regulatory tool and the studies related to its implementation in the tourist sector, the first part presents the theoretical framework focused on network typologies related to the Contratto di Rete (CR) practices. The second part discusses the results of an empirical research on three CRs, operating in a mountain area in the South of Italy that promote a Tourist District.