EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The new territorial paradigm of rural development: theoretical foundations from systems and institutional theories

Mateo Ambrosio-Albalá and Johan Bastiaensen

No 2010.02, IOB Discussion Papers from Universiteit Antwerpen, Institute of Development Policy (IOB)

Abstract: In recent decades, a new paradigm for public policies in rural areas has made headway. This new approach aims to support economic and institutional transformation processes designed and implemented by local rural actors themselves. It argues for the building of local partnerships as atoolfor the governance of rural change. This paper reflects about the governance of development and change in rural areas. It builds a conceptual framework from two complementary theoretical sources: (a) complexity theory views on the governance of resilience and (b) institutional theories. Given the impossibility to predict and plan social change in a top-down fashion, it stresses that change requires that actors of a social system construct a sufficiently shared vision of a desired future state and manage to act together in order to ‘navigate’ the pathway towards that aim. Capacity for territorial governance is also critical in rural governance of resilience. System resilience refers to the capacity of actors to adjust the desired pathway whenever external shocks threaten its viability, or in certain cases, impose the need for a more fundamental change in the prevailing system and the desired pathways of change. We argue that these theoretical inspirations provide a useful substantiated underpinning for the territorial paradigm of rural development and allow us to show why and how the local partnership has the potential to improve the governance and the resilience of rural territories. We also develop a number of further reflections about the challenges of such partnerships, in particular the difficulties emerging from heterogeneous interest and power of local actors.

Pages: 66 pages
Date: 2010-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://medialibrary.uantwerpen.be/oldcontent/cont ... bala-Bastiaensen.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iob:dpaper:2010002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IOB Discussion Papers from Universiteit Antwerpen, Institute of Development Policy (IOB) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hans De Backer (hans.debacker@uantwerpen.be).

 
Page updated 2024-11-08
Handle: RePEc:iob:dpaper:2010002