Estrategias de desarrollo rural territorial basadas en las especificidades rurales. El caso de la marca Calidad Rural en España

RESUMEN: Este artículo pretende responder a la siguiente pregunta: ¿la acción colectiva puede generar dinámicas de desarrollo rural territorial viables, basadas en la diferenciación? Dado que las áreas rurales tienen elementos diferenciales distintos la respuesta a esta pregunta es necesariamente múltiple. Para responder a la pregunta se presenta en primer lugar una revisión de la literatura sobre el enfoque territorial del desarrollo rural, identificando sus principales elementos conceptuales. En segundo lugar, se realiza un análisis empírico en dos niveles: uno general, a escala de toda España, y otro temático dirigido al caso objeto de estudio: la marca territorial Calidad Rural®. ABSTRACT: The need to resolve the conflict of interests between proponents of agricultural competitiveness and advocates of sustainable development led the European Union to implement a new strategy in the nineties. This strategy was called “territorial rural development” and arose as an experiment to secure a future for rural areas in the midst of increasing deregulation and economic liberalization. What began as a public policy initiative has gradually developed a theoretical framework, and today many authors highlight the potential of this new multi-sectorial strategy. Territorial rural development seeks the productive and institutional transformation of rural areas. According to this theoretical perspective, “territories” are the result of a process of social construction, as they emerge through the cooperation and consensus of local actors. For decades, the LEADER Community Initiative has been the channel for applying the concept of territorial construction and implementing territorial transformation strategies in rural areas of Europe. Following the experience of the first programming periods, the conceptual and methodological principles of these strategies crossed the Atlantic and began to be applied in Latin America. Innovation has always been viewed as a key dimension of transformation strategies aimed at changing the negative trends of systems in decline. For this reason, rural innovation is one of the more or less explicit objectives of rural development programmes in the EU. However, what may seem easy to achieve in rural systems turns out to be very difficult in rural areas given their particular limitations. Innovation must be able to produce territorial value added as a means to create income and employment and thus improve people’s living conditions. Nonetheless, most of the innovation experiences described in the progress reports of the first rural development programmes were largely unsuccessful in terms of innovation and value added. Rural territorial development programmes originally emerged as an example for other similar programmes to follow where possible. Empirical experience, however, has shown that it is very difficult to identify and replicate successful projects. The methodological difficulty in replicating successful projects lies in endorsing their contribution to regional competitiveness in a scenario that differs from that of their origin. Many authors agree that an effective way to achieve this objective is through income differentiation based on local resources. Given the diversity of rural areas, each should pursue the best strategy for leveraging their resources and local capacities to meet the challenges that lie ahead. Several authors have examined the importance and viability of rural development strategies based on differentiation. For these authors, the implementation and development of rural differentiation strategies are processes of “social construction” linked to different forms of collective action. This article focuses on the following research question: how can collective action facilitate viable rural development dynamics based on differentiation? In light of the diversity of rural areas, this question can be answered in multiple ways. And that leads to a second question (and problem): can the dynamics of collective action build strategies aimed at generating income based on these differences? To answer these questions, we first review the literature on the territorial approach to rural development, and identify its main conceptual elements. Secondly, we perform an empirical analysis on two levels: a general analysis focusing on Spain, and another more specific analysis centred on the case under study. The general empirical analysis is carried out using secondary data on all the regions and Local Action Groups (LAGs) of Spain. The aim of this analysis is to determine whether the degree of socioeconomic development of the study area (in this case provinces) is a determining factor in the potential for and degree of advancement of territorial rural development strategies at the scale of individual LAGs. We develop a provincial-level typology and a typology of LAGs for the period 2007-2013. The LAG typology, which is based on demographic criteria, as well as identity, socioeconomic dynamics, and the role of the public sector, allows synthesizing the complexity and diversity of rural areas in Spain. In overlapping both typologies, we find that the dynamism of territorial strategies is not necessarily conditioned by where they are implemented. In other words, the degree of collective action of these upstream projects has greater explanatory power than specific local circumstances. In the specific tematic analysis, we examine different types of origin quality labels and classify them according to the extent to which they are linked to development strategies. In addition, the effectiveness of quality differentiation strategies is discussed with regard to the trivialization of these labels. In this second level, we examine the strategies of all the rural areas in Spain that participate in a broader project linked to quality:the European Territorial Quality Label (ETQM). This trans-national project of cooperation aims for the creation of an “umbrella” brand on a European scale in an effort to simplify the quality labels used to convey quality messages to consumers. The ETQM has been designed as the most visible part of a broader territorial rural development strategy based on quality differentiation, and as a tool to strengthen the capacity for collective action on the local scale. In this study, we develop a synthetic index to measure the degree of development of a territorial label. Calculating the value of this index for the 31 territorial labels that exist in Spain under the ETQM Project permits us to draw conclusions that reinforce and deepen the findings obtained with the first-level analysis. The main conclusion of this analysis is that the most effective territorial rural development strategies based on quality differentiation are implemented in provinces with an intermediate level of socioeconomic development, and by LAGs with a medium level of success. This research therefore seems to confirm the hypothesis that structural factors do not necessarily have the most influence on the development of a general territorial development strategy or a specific quality differentiation strategy. This conclusion has important implications for the design and implementation of territorial development policies.