Descripción:
"A course on rural development was offered through the distance educationmodality from september 2002 to january 2003. it was carried out as part theregional project on technical cooperation for fodepal (spanish acronym foreducation in economics and agrarian and rural development policies in latinamerica). teachers from latin america and spain worked with 45 professionals frompublic and private institutions in the field of rural and agrarian development.based on the material generated in the debates held throughout the course, theobjective of this study is, first of all, to identify and discuss the basic features of therural 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 institutionalorganization can be observed; there are no clear and stable rules agreed upon byconsensus that would allow the articulation, coordination, control and evaluationof different kinds of programs and projects. these, though dealing with differenttopics and territories, affect one single region.as a response to these negative characteristics, the second objective of the studyaims at defining the requirements that a new approach to rural development in latinamerica should fulfill. to do so, the main challenges of the continent are analyzedat international, regional and local development levels; general guidelines aresuggested.Finally, the third objective is to evaluate carefully the possibility of implementingin Latin America the local development approach suggested by the leader initiative(a community initiative of the european commission whose purpose is to promoterural development from a territorial perspective, on the basis of economicdiversification, innovation, local population commitment, and good use of endogenous resources). to reach this objective, a general analysis is made of thepossibility of using the same approach in Latin America. Thorough discussion ofthree difficulties of such transference complete the analysis: the need for a publicprivatepartnership, management discretion, and lack of budgetary resources."