Rural policy between exploration and exploitation: Comparing Italy's SNAI and France's Agenda Rural

Rural territories in Europe face challenges of access to services, depopulation, and limited administrative capacity. Governments respond with national policies driven by a strong push for institutional innovation, redefining which territories count as marginal and rural and how the State organises its support. This article compares two policy responses: Italy's National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) and France's Agenda Rural. Both policies address the same problem, rural marginality, but treat it differently: for SNAI, it is a constitutive criterion for selecting target territories, while for Agenda Rural, it is an unequal condition within a broader rural population. Building on Hartley's (2005) typology of innovation and March's (1991) exploration-exploitation dilemma, we analyse how five dimensions of innovation, in each policy, combine into a cognitive-symbolic component, which produces discursive recognition of marginality or rurality, and an operative-technical component, which organises the support needed to translate that recognition into capacity for action. The analysis draws on policy documents, evaluation reports, semi-structured interviews, and observation of thematic forums. The research shows that SNAI is predominantly exploratory, introducing criteria, bodies, and methods that are largely unprecedented, amid implementation frictions. Agenda Rural, by contrast, is hybrid on the cognitive-symbolic component and exploitative on the operative-technical one, relying on pre-existing administrative networks. The article contributes to rural studies and to the comparative analysis of rural policies, examining on one hand the concepts of rurality and marginality, and on the other how exploration and exploitation combine in forms of institutional innovation.