Desarrollo rural vs. desarrollo local

Abstract

The subject of this paper is the discussion about the concepts of rural development and local development starting from the different lines that tend in their making up: the Geographic epistemology, the politics based on them and the material processes of development. The issues of this discussion are: the difficulty of reflect this development processes in quantitative evidences (indicators) due to their rather qualitative character; the ambiguous definition of their scale, and related to that, their condition spread or concentrated; their suitability to make compatible objectives of both territorial and social cohesion; the limitations to be extrapolated the concept of stakeholders, own of local development, to rural development; the lack of coordination between economic planning and urban planning to the detriment of a true sustainability and, in the opposite, the threats that are to the rural space the application of sustainability politics designed from the urban context.