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Abstract
The development of rural areas continues
to be an international priority. The urgent need to fight
poverty (mainly concentrated in rural areas) in
developing countries, and the demand for increasing
economic and social cohesion in developed countries,
explain this priority on the political agendas of
multilateral bodies, the EU and most other countries.
When Development Economics was acknowledged as
part of the social and economic theory in the 50’s,
different theories and models have tried to explain the
unevenness of development and the key elements or
conditions that foster it. Traditional rural development
programmes were characterised by the implementation
of non coordinated, sectoral, horizontal and top-down
policies and strategies. The lack of effectiveness and the
failures prompted by these policies have propelled the
development of new approaches. Territorial rural
development is a policy approach embracing
contributions from different theoretical frameworks
that attempt to foster development strategies based on
the consideration of territory as a social construction.
Thus, the territory (including all the existing elements
and its interactions) has become a key actor for
development. However, most of these approaches
contemplate rural world through simplistic and monodimensional
analysis based on methodologies from single
disciplines and on quantitative and/or qualitative
morphological descriptions. The pretended multidisciplinarity,
frequently ends up on an addition of
mono-disciplinary analysis around the object of study.
The objective of the present paper is to check the role
different elements considered relevant for development
by literature´s recent approaches play or can play in
rural territories with a very different development
situation, using techniques and tools that allow the
analysis of rural areas from a complex perspective.