Understanding rural areas dynamics from a complex perspective. An application of Prospective Structural Analysis

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.territorial rural development, complexity, prospective structural analysis, Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Understanding rural areas dynamics from a complex perspective. An application of Prospective Structural Analysis

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

Application of Prospective Structural Analysis to Rural Development Strategy

The Council Regulation (EC) 1698/2005 approved on 20th September 2005 was the starting point of the fourth programme of Rural Development Aid for the period 2007-2013. This communitarian programme affects Andalusia, an European region situated in the south of Spain. The authors of this paper have helped in the elaboration of the rural strategy for this region. We would specially like to point out the use of the Prospective Structural Analysis (PSA) methodology as a competent method to analyse the complexity of elements, variables and present interactions in rural zones as well as to understand variables in the present and future situation. Results obtained with the application of the PSA method to a region show the strength of this methodology in order to help the process of reflection about influencing economic and social agents in the analysed area

Rural development drivers and public policy formulation: the use of prospective structural analysis

Traditional economic development theories have struggled to identify, in a comprehensive manner, the drivers and constraints that explain singular development paths and lead to spatial inequalities. Assuming that development patterns are territory-specific, the research hypothesis is that public policies should have a better understanding of territorial dynamics in order to propose strategies efficient to trigger changes. This paper applies the use of Prospective Structural Analysis (PSA), a foresight analysis technique, to explore the territorial dynamics. The results show that, within a territory, the variables play different roles, and suggest that rural policies might have focused on factors that have few influence in fostering changes rather than on those with leverage effects

Rural development drivers and public policy formulation: the use of prospective structural analysis

Traditional economic development theories have struggled to identify, in a comprehensive manner, the drivers and constraints that explain singular development paths and lead to spatial inequalities. Assuming that development patterns are territory-specific, the research hypothesis is that public policies should have a better understanding of territorial dynamics in order to propose strategies efficient to trigger changes. This paper applies the use of Prospective Structural Analysis (PSA), a foresight analysis technique, to explore the territorial dynamics. The results show that, within a territory, the variables play different roles, and suggest that rural policies might have focused on factors that have few influence in fostering changes rather than on those with leverage effects.Rural development policies, territorial rural development, prospective structural analysis, Community/Rural/Urban Development, O18,