Evaluating Territorial Capital of Fragile Territories: The Case of Sardinia

We present a framework for the evaluation of "territorial capital", specifically devised as support for policy design on fragile territories, the so called "inner areas". The evaluation procedure leverages open data sources in a multi-criteria spatial evaluation procedure, yielding a dashboard with geographical distribution of indicators of territorial capital, subdivided into its eight constituent dimensions (human, social, cognitive, infrastructural, productive, relational, environmental, and settlement capital). To showcase the working, outputs, and possible uses of the evaluation framework for territorial analysis and policy design, we present the results of a case study application on the Island of Sardinia. The interest and novelty of this research is possibly threefold: the conceptualisation of the notion of "territorial capital" in terms of capabilities for development; its operationalisation in a spatial evaluation model which accounts also for potential spatial interactions; and finally, the application in the case study, illustrating possible employment and usefulness of such results for territorial analysis and policy design.