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PALABRAS CLAVE: Desarrollo territorial, Especificidad rural, Diferenciación, Calidad, Marca territorial, Acción colectiva
KEY WORDS: Territorial development, Rural specificities, Differentiation, Quality, Territorial mark, Collective action
CLASIFICACIÓN JEL: L15, O18, R58
RESUMEN:
Este artículo pretende responder a la siguiente pregunta: ¿la acción colectiva puede generar dinámicas de desarrollo rural territorial viables, basadas en la diferenciación? Dado que las áreas rurales tienen elementos diferenciales distintos, la respuesta a esta pregunta es necesariamente múltiple. Para responder a la pregunta se presenta en primer lugar una revisión de la literatura sobre el enfoque territorial del desarrollo rural, identificando sus principales elementos conceptuales. En segundo lugar, se realiza un análisis empírico en dos niveles: uno general, a escala de toda España, y otro temático dirigido al caso objeto de estudio: la marca territorial Calidad Rural®.
ABSTRACT:
The need to resolve the conflict of interests between proponents of agricultural competitiveness and advocates of sustainable development led the European Union to implement a new strategy in the nineties. This strategy was called "territorial rural development" and arose as an experiment to secure a future for rural areas in the midst of increasing deregulation and economic liberalization. What began as a public policy initiative has gradually developed a theoretical framework, and today many authors highlight the potential of this new multi-sectorial strategy.
Territorial rural development seeks the productive and institutional transformation of rural areas. According to this theoretical perspective, "territories" are the result of a process of social construction, as they emerge through the cooperation and consensus of local actors. For decades, the LEADER Community Initiative has been the channel for applying the concept of territorial construction and implementing territorial transformation strategies in rural areas of Europe. Following the experience of the first programming periods, the conceptual and methodological principles of these strategies crossed the Atlantic and began to be applied in Latin America.
Innovation has always been viewed as a key dimension of transformation strategies aimed at changing the negative trends of systems in decline. For this reason, rural innovation is one of the more or less explicit objectives of rural development programmes in the EU. However, what may seem easy to achieve in rural systems turns out to be very difficult in rural areas given their particular limitations. Innovation must...