Intangibles of Rural Development. The Case Study of La Vera (Extremadura, Spain)

Abstract

In the early 1990s, with the Leader Initiative, the European Commission intended to apply a new development model in order to encourage the economic diversification of the rural world. The expectations raised by the first Leader Initiative motivated Spain to approve the Proder Program to allow those regions that had not been beneficiaries of the aforementioned initiative to put similar projects into practice. This kind of program has various characteristics, which have been widely studied from a theoretical point of view. Nevertheless, empirical studies that analyze the relevance of those characteristics (especially the intangible ones) are less frequent. The main objective of this research is, precisely, to study how these intangibles materialize in the implementation of a rural development strategy. For this, a qualitative methodology based on a case study of the La Vera region is adopted. The results show that these intangible characteristics obtain a disparate valuation from the local promoters. While aspects such as the management system or the contribution of these programs to regional identity are well valued, others, such as the participation of the population in development processes, do not seem to reach the expectations. This study gives some proposals for the evaluation of these characteristics.