Territorial Competitiveness and Rural Development: EU and Latin American Discourses from a Theoretically Informed Perspective

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In Latin America, the urgent need to fight poverty (which is mainly concentrated in rural areas), and in Europe the demand for increasing social and territorial cohesion, partially explains the priority given to new rural-urban territorial discourses in the development agenda of both continents. Bottom-up endogenous development vis-à-vis top-down state-led growth, productivist vis-à-vis environmentally-friendly and sustainable farm practices have become buzzwords in the development literature of the European Union (EU) and Latin America (LA).
Parallel to these changes in development discourses, in both regions local-global interactions are generating new links across the rural-urban divide. Yet, despite these similarities in discourse are the underlying socio-economic processes really similar in LA and the EU? Can development recipes be uncritically transplanted both sides of the North-South global divide?
It is thus time to develop a theoretically informed comparative perspective on the reconstitution of social actor spaces through the urban-rural divide in both the EU and LA, contextualizing new territorial (urban-rural) links within current globalization processes.
In both the EU and Latin America, these new rural-urban links include movements of people, goods and services, information and money (e.g. remittances back home). As a result ideas, socioeconomic interests, and invididual perceptions also move across these locations.
The paper´s objectives are three. First, to analyze these new rural development discourses: multifunctionality in the EU, territorial rural development in Latin America, endogenous growth in both regions. Two, to analyse what are the underlying processes linking rural hinterlands and urban centers in both continents? And three, to identify theoretical perspectives appropriate to understand these processes and underpin these new development discourses?

Stream: Economic Sustainability

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

LUIS LLAMBI is chair of the Rural and Agrarian Studies Group, Anthropology Centre, at the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC). At IVIC he is Full Professor (Investigador Titular Emérito). The Rural and Agricultural Studies Group is an interdisciplinary research team embracing sociologists, anthropologists and economists together with agronomists and agroecologists. The Laboratory main goal is to analyze the processes of change of Latin American agrofood systems and rural societies as they relate to macro-structural economic, political, and cultural changes.