Las políticas de desarrollo rural en América Latinarequerimientos de un nuevo enfoque

Abstract

A course on rural development was offered through the distance education modality from september 2002 to january 2003. it was carried out as part the regional project on technical cooperation for fodepal (spanish acronym for education in economics and agrarian and rural development policies in latin america). teachers from latin america and spain worked with 45 professionals from public and private institutions in the field of rural and agrarian development. based on the material generated in the debates held throughout the course, the objective of this study is, first of all, to identify and discuss the basic features of the rural development public policies applied in latin america in the last three decades. as a result of this analysis, a lack of rural development strategies and institutional organization can be observed; there are no clear and stable rules agreed upon by consensus that would allow the articulation, coordination, control and evaluation of different kinds of programs and projects. these, though dealing with different topics and territories, affect one single region. as a response to these negative characteristics, the second objective of the study aims at defining the requirements that a new approach to rural development in latin america should fulfill. to do so, the main challenges of the continent are analyzed at international, regional and local development levels; general guidelines are suggested. Finally, the third objective is to evaluate carefully the possibility of implementing in Latin America the local development approach suggested by the leader initiative (a community initiative of the european commission whose purpose is to promote rural development from a territorial perspective, on the basis of economic diversification, innovation, local population commitment, and good use of endogenous resources). to reach this objective, a general analysis is made of the possibility of using the same approach in Latin America. Thorough discussion of three difficulties of such transference complete the analysis: the need for a publicprivate partnership, management discretion, and lack of budgetary resources.