El aporte de la ruralidad al desarrollo

A recent transition in the field of agrarian economics theory is that of a move away from a narrow agricultural sector approach to rural development, to one which adopts broader territorial approaches. This passage seeks to interpret the interactions between urban and rural worlds in a more comprehensive manner. This relatively new theoretical perspective is of particular interest to academics and politicians in Latin American countries where, since the mid 1990s, the concept of new rurality has been seen as the source of a new approach to rural development. The purpose of this research is to clarify the analytical signposts, identify the differences between sectoral and territorial approaches in fostering rural development policies, and place the new rurality theme in the context of heterogeneous rural economies. This approach has been applied to the Maule Region in Chile, where a strong agrarian economy co-exists with a weak rurality. A cluster analysis was applied to delineate homogeneous territorial aggregations, with the objective of proposing rural development policies.